John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"Jesus. Uh, sorry."

She smiled at him. "You just didn't get enough of it, you know? If you'd stayed at St. Agnes for another two, three years, who knows? Maybe it'd be Father Davenport."

Lucas laughed. "That's a hair-raising thought," he said. "Can you see me running the little ankle-biters through First Communion?"

"Yes," she said. "In fact, I can."

The phone was ringing when Lucas got back to his office It was Carla. She thought the shoes on the maddog were the Nike Air model, but she was not sure which variation.

"But the bubble thing on the sole is right. There wasn't anything else like it," she said.

"Thanks, Carla. See you tomorrow."

Lucas spent ten minutes calling discount shoe stores, getting prices, and then walked up the stairs to the homicide office. Anderson was sitting in his cubbyhole, looking at papers.

"Am I set on the meeting?" Lucas asked.

"Yep. Just about everybody will be there," Anderson said. He was a shabby man, too thin, with nicotine-stained teeth and small porcine eyes. His necktie was too wide and usually ended in the middle of his stomach, eight inches above his belt. His grammar was bad and his breath often smelled of sausage. None of it meant much to his colleagues. Anderson had a better homicide-clearance rate than any other man in the department. On his own time he wrote law-enforcement computer-management programs that sold across the country. "There'll be four missing, but they're pretty marginal anyway. You can talk to them later if you want."

"What about the union?"

"We cooled them out. The union guy will give a statement before you talk."

"That sounds good," Lucas said. He took out his notebook. "I've got some stuff I want to get in the data base."

"Okay." Anderson swiveled in his chair and punched up his IBM. "Go ahead."

"He's very light-complexioned, which means he's probably blond or sandy-haired. Probably an office worker or a clerk of some kind, maybe a professional, and reasonably well-off. May have been born in the Southwest. New Mexico, like that. Arizona. Texas. May have moved up here fairly recently."

Anderson punched it into the computer and when he was done, looked up with a frown. "Jesus, Davenport, Where'd you get this?"

"Talking to Ruiz. They're guesses, but I think they're good. Now. Have somebody go around to the post offices and pull the change-of-address forms for anybody coming in from those areas. Add Oklahoma. Everybody who moved into the seven-county metro area from those places."

"There could be hundreds of them."

"Yeah, but we can eliminate a lot of them right off the bat. Too old, female, black, blue-collar, originally from here and moving back… Besides, hundreds are better than millions, which is what we got now. Once we get a list, we might be able to cross-reference against some other lists, if we get any more."

Anderson pursed his lips and then nodded. "I'll do it," he said. "We got nothing else."

They met in the same room where the press conference had been held the night before, thirty-odd cops and civilians, an assistant city attorney, three union officials. They stopped talking when Lucas entered the room.

"All right," he said, standing at the front. "This is serious. We want the union to talk first."

One of the union men stood, cleared his throat, looked at a piece of paper, folded it, and stuck it back in his coat pocket.

"Normally, the union would object to what's going to happen here. But we talked it over with the chief and I guess we've got no complaint. Not at this point. Nobody is being accused of anything. Nobody's going to be forced to do anything. We think for the good of the force that everybody ought to hear what Davenport 's going to say."

He sat down and the cops looked back at Lucas.

"What I'm going to say is this," Lucas said, scanning the crowd. "Somebody took a piece out of the property room. It was a Smith, Model 15. From the David L. Losse box. You remember the Losse case, it was the guy who lit up his kid? Said it was an accident? Went down on manslaughter?" Several heads nodded.

"Anyway, it was probably somebody in this room who took it. Most of the people with access are here. Now, that gun was used by this maddog killer. We want to know how he got it. We don't think anybody here is the maddog. But somebody here, somehow, got this gun out to him."

Several cops started to speak at the same time, but Lucas put up his hand and silenced them.

"Wait a minute. Listen to the rest of it. There might be any number of reasons somebody thought it was a good idea to take the piece. It's a good gun and maybe somebody needed a backup piece. Or a piece for his wife, for home protection, and it got stolen. Whatever. The maddog gets his hands on it. We're looking for the connection.

"Now, the chief is going to put IAD on it and they're going to be talking to every one of you. They're not going to do anything else until they find out what happened."

Lucas paused and looked around the room again.

" Unless, "he said. "Unless somebody comes forward and tells me what happened. I give you these guarantees. First, I don't tell anybody else. I don't cooperate with IAD. And once we know, well, the chief admits there'd be no reason to really push the investigation. We got better things to do than chase some guy who took a gun."

Lucas pointed at the assistant city attorney. "Tell them about the punishment ruling."

The attorney stepped toward the center of the room and cleared his throat. "Before the chief can discipline a man, he has to give specific cause. We've ruled if the cause is alleged criminal wrongdoing, he has to provide the same proof as he would in court. He is not allowed to punish on a lesser standard. In other words, he can't say, 'Joe Smith, you're demoted because you committed theft.' He has to prove the theft to the same standards as he would in court-actually, for practical purposes, he has to get a conviction."

Lucas took over again.

"What I'm saying is, you call me, tell me where to meet you. Bring a lawyer if you want. I'll refuse to read you your rights. I'll admit to entrapment. I'll do anything reasonable that would kill my testimony in court. That way, even if I talked, you couldn't be punished. And I won't talk.

"You guys know me. I won't burn you. And we've got to catch this guy. I'm passing out my card, I've written my home phone number on the back. I want everyone to put the card in his pocket, so the guy who needs it won't be out there by himself. I'll be home all night." He handed a stack of business cards to a cop in the front row, who took one, divided the rest in half, and passed them in two directions.

"Tell them the rest of it, Davenport," said the union man.

"Yeah, the rest of it," said Lucas. "If nobody talks to me, we push the IAD investigation and we push the murder investigation. Sooner or later we'll identify the guy who took the gun. And if we have to do it that way…"

He tried to pick out each face in the room before he said it: "… we'll find a felony to hang on it. We'll put somebody in Stillwater."

An angry buzz spread through the group.

"Hey, fuck it," Lucas said, raising his voice over the noise. "This guy's butchered three women in the worst way you could do it. Go ask homicide if you want the details. But don't give me any brotherhood shit. I don't like this any better than you guys. But I need to know about that piece."

Anderson caught him in the hall after the meeting.

"What do you think?"

Lucas nodded down the hallway, where a half-dozen of his cards littered the floor.

"Most of them kept the cards. I've got nothing to do but go home and wait."