John Sandford - Rules of Prey

"You it? "Lucas asked.

"You wearing a wire?"

"No."

"If you are, you're entrapping me."

"I admit it. If I am, I'm entrapping you. But I'm not."

"Read me my rights."

"Nope."

"Hmph. You know, this is all horseshit," Roe said, taking a sip of his coffee. "If they put you on the witness stand, you might tell a whole 'nother story."

"Won't be any witness stand, Harry. I could walk out of here right now, go to Daniel, say 'Harry Roe is the man,' and the IAD would put together a case in three days. You know how it goes, once they got a starting point."

"Yeah." Roe looked around wearily and shook his head. "Jesus, I hate this."

"So tell me."

"Not much to tell. I figured that piece was cold. Never show up in a million years. There was this guy down the block, Larry Rice was his name, I grew up with him. He was a maintenance man for the city. I used to see him around City Hall all the time. You probably seen him yourself. Heavyset guy with a limp, always wore one of those striped train-engineer hats."

"Yeah, I remember him."

"Anyway, he was dying of some kind of cancer, little bit by little bit. It was working its way up his body. First he couldn't walk, then he couldn't control his bowels, like that. His wife was working and he was at home. One day these neighborhood punks came in and took the TV and stereo right out from in front of him. He had this wheelchair, but he couldn't fight them. He couldn't identify them, either, because they were wearing paper sacks on their heads… Assholes is who they were."

"So you got him the gun?"

"Well, his wife came over after this happened, and asked my wife if I had an extra gun. I didn't. I'm no gun freak-sorry, I know you're into guns, but I'm not."

"That's okay."

"So I went up there to the property room and I knew about the gun because I worked on the case. I figured there was no way in hell it would ever be needed for anything."

"And you took it."

Roe took a sip of his coffee. "Yep."

"So this Rice guy…"

"He's dead. Two months ago."

"Shit. How about his wife?"

"She's still out there. After the meeting this afternoon, I went over and asked her about the gun. She said she didn't know where it was. She looked, but it was gone. She said the last couple of weeks before he died, Larry sold a whole bunch of personal stuff to get money for her. He was afraid he wouldn't leave anything. She said when he died, he left about a thousand bucks behind."

"She doesn't know who got the gun?"

"No. I asked her how he sold the stuff and she said he just sold it to people he knew, friends and so on. He had a little sign in the window, she said, but he didn't advertise it or nothing. People might see the sign walking by on the sidewalk, but that was all." Roe passed a slip of paper across the table. "I told her you'd want to see her. Here's her address."

"Thanks." Lucas drained the last of his Coke.

"Now what?" asked Roe.

"Now nothing. If you've been telling the truth."

"It's the truth," Roe said levelly. "I feel like a piece of shit."

"Yeah, it's a bummer. It won't go any further than this table, though I suppose if we ever need Mrs. Rice to testify, somebody could figure it out. But it won't come to anything."

"Thanks, man. I owe you."

Roe left first, relieved to get away. Lucas watched his car pull out of the parking lot, then got up and strolled past the counter.

"You mind if I make a comment?" he asked the counter-girl.

"No, go ahead." She smiled politely.

"You're too pretty to be working in this place. I'm not hustling you, I'm just telling you. You're an attraction. If you stay here, sooner or later you're going to catch some bad news."

"I need the money," she said, her face tense and serious.

"You don't need it that bad," he said.

"I have two more years at the university, one year for my bachelor's and nine more months for my master's."

Lucas shook his head. "If I knew your parents, I'd call them. But I don't. So I'm just telling you. Get out of here. Or get on the day shift."

He turned and started away.

"Thanks," she called after him. But he knew she wouldn't do anything about it. He stepped outside, considered the problem for a minute, and went back in.

"How many tacos could you rip off without anyone knowing about it? I mean, every night. A couple of dozen?"

"Why?"

"If you gave a cup of coffee and a free taco to every patrol cop who came in, say, from ten o'clock at night to six in the morning, you'd have cops around, or arriving or leaving, most of the night. It'd give you some cover."

She looked interested. "We wouldn't have hundreds of cops or anything, would we?"

"No. On a heavy night, maybe twenty or thirty."

"Shoot," she said cheerfully. "The owner has trouble keeping people working here. He's kind of desperate. I don't think I'd have to steal them. I think he'd say okay."

Lucas took out a business card and handed it to her. "This is my office phone. Call me tomorrow. If the boss says okay, I'll get the word out about the free coffee and tacos. I'll tell both towns, you'll have cops coming in from all over the place."

"I'll call tomorrow," she said. "Thanks really a lot."

Lucas nodded and turned away. If it worked out, he'd have another source on the street.

When Lucas designed his games, he laid them out on sheets of heavy white drawing paper, twenty-two by thirty inches, so he could draw the logical connections between the elements. The visual representation helped him to avoid the inconsistencies that drew sophomorically scathing letters from teenage gamers.

Back at the house, he got four sheets of paper, carried them to the spare bedroom, and pinned them to the wall with push-pins. With a wide-tip felt pen he wrote the name of one victim at the top of each sheet: Bell, Morris, Ruiz, Lewis. Beneath the names, he wrote the dates, and under the dates, what he hoped were relevant personal characteristics of the victims.

When he finished, he lay back on the bed, propped his head on a pillow, and looked at the wall charts. Nothing came. He got up, put up a fifth one, and wrote "Maddog" at the top of it. Under that he wrote:

Well-off: Wears Nike Airs. Clean clothes. Cologne.

Convinced real-estate saleswoman that he could afford expensive home. May be new to area: Has accent, wore T-shirt on August night.

May be from Southwest: Ruiz recognized accent. Office job: Soft hands amp; body, arms white. Not a fighter.

Fair skin: Arms very pale. Probably blond. Sex freak? Game player? Both? Neither? Intelligent. Leaves no clues. Wears gloves even when preparing notes, loading shells in pistol.

He thought a moment and added. "Knew Larry Rice?"

He peered at the list, and reached out and underlined "real-estate saleswoman" and "Knew Larry Rice?"

If he was new to the area, maybe he really was looking for a house, and met Lewis that way. It would be worth checking area real-estate offices.

And he might have known Larry Rice. But that worked against the proposition that he was new to the area-if Rice had been dying of cancer, that would presumably take some time, and he wouldn't be making many friends along the way.

A hospital? A doctor in a hospital? It was a possibility. It would account for the maddog's delicate touch with the knife. And a doctor would have the soft hands and body, and would be well-off. And doctors, especially new ones, were mobile. All of these women could have been to a doctor…

He walked back to the library and took down a volume on the history of crime and paged through it. Doctors as murderers had a whole section of their own.

Dr. William Palmer of England killed at least six and maybe a dozen people for their money in the mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Thomas Cream killed half a dozen women with botched abortions and poison in Canada, the U.S., and England; Dr. Bennett Hyde killed at least three in Kansas City; Dr. Marcel Petiot murdered at least sixty-three Jews whom he had promised to smuggle out of Nazi-occupied France; Dr. Robert Clements of England killed his four wives before he was caught. The "torture doctor" of Chicago, who had studied medicine but never quite became a doctor, killed as many as two hundred young women who had been attracted to the city by the 1893 World's Fair. The worst of the bunch, of course, were the Nazis. Medical men associated with the death camps had killed thousands.