John Sandford - Rules of Prey

The list of doctors who had killed only one or two was lengthy, including several celebrated cases in the United States since the 1950's.

Lucas shut the book, thought about it, and looked at his watch. Two-thirty. Far too late to call. He paced and looked at his watch again. Fuck it. He went into the workroom, got his briefcase with Carla Ruiz' phone number, and called. She answered on the seventh ring.

"Hello?" Half-asleep.

"Carla? Ruiz?"

"Yes?" Still sleepy, but suspicious now.

"This is Lucas… the detective. I'm sorry to wake you up, but I'm sitting here looking at some stuff and I need to ask you a question. Okay? Are you awake?"

"Uh, yes."

"When was the last time you saw a doctor and where was it?"

"Uh, gee…" There was a long silence. "A couple of years ago, I guess. A woman at the clinic over on the west side."

"You're sure that was the last? No visits to hospitals, nothing like that?"

"No."

"How about with a friend, just stopping by, visiting?"

"No. Nothing like that. I don't think I've been in a hospital since, well, my mother died, fifteen years ago."

"Know any doctors socially?"

"A few come to the gallery, I guess. I don't really know any personally. I mean, I've talked to some at openings and so on."

"Okay. Look, go on back to bed. I'll talk to you tomorrow. And thanks."

He dropped the phone back on the hook. "Shit," he said aloud. It was possible, but a long shot. He made a mental note to check the gallery for regular patrons who were doctors. But it didn't sound good.

He looked at the charts for a few more minutes, yawned, turned out the light, and headed for his bedroom. The guy was smart. Nuts, but smart. A player? Maybe.

Maybe a player.

Lucas edged into the briefing room, late again.

"Where the fuck you been?" Daniel asked angrily.

"Up late," Lucas said.

"Sit down." Daniel looked around the room. A half-dozen detectives peered into their working notebooks. "To sum up, what we got is about three hundred pages of reports that don't mean diddly-squat. Am I wrong? Somebody tell me I'm wrong."

Harmon Anderson shook his head. "I don't see anything. Not yet. It might be in there, but I don't see it."

"What about this stuff that you got, Lucas?" asked one of the detectives. "Is it reliable?"

Lucas shrugged. "Yeah, I think so. There're a lot of guesses in there, but I think they're pretty good."

"So what?" said Daniel. "So we're looking for a medium-sized white guy who works in an office. That cuts it down to a half-million guys, not including St. Paul."

"Who recently moved up here from the Southwest," said Lucas. "That cuts out another 499,000 guys."

"But that could be bullshit. Probably is," Daniel snorted.

"We might know a little more in a couple of hours," Lucas said. Daniel raised an eyebrow. "The gun guy called last night. I know where the gun went."

"Well, Jesus!" Daniel exploded.

Lucas shook his head. "Don't get your hopes up." He explained how the gun got to Larry Rice and that Rice was dead. "His wife told my man that she doesn't know where the pistol went. Probably sold. Could have been stolen, I suppose."

"Okay, but it's something," said Daniel. "He had the gun for what, six months? And he probably sold it to somebody he knew."

Daniel pointed at Anderson. "Your best man. Best interrogator. Put him on her. We squeeze every goddamned drop out of her. Everybody her old man saw in the last six months. She must know most of them. The killer should be on the list."

"I'm talking to her this afternoon," Lucas said, looking at Anderson. "One o'clock. Your man could meet me there, we'll go in together."

"So are we going to get the name of the guy who took the piece?" asked Daniel.

Lucas shook his head. "No. I swore. You could probably break it out of Rice, if you want, but you really don't want to know. He was doing a kindness. He's a pretty good guy."

Daniel looked at him for a minute and nodded. "Okay. But if it becomes relevant…"

"You might be able to break it out of Rice," Lucas repeated. "You won't get it from me."

There was a moment of silence; then Daniel let it go. "We've got another problem," he said. "Somebody fed a story to Jennifer Carey that we have an attack survivor. I'm going to talk to her in ten minutes and try to put her off. Anybody know anything about who tipped her off?"

Nobody answered.

"We can't have this," Daniel said.

One of the detectives cleared his throat. "I might, uh, have an idea about that."

"What?"

"She shot that documentary on St. Paul cops, the one that ran on PBS? She's got sources over there you wouldn't believe."

"Okay. Maybe that's it. So now, we don't talk to St. Paul cops any more than we have to. Be polite, but…" He groped for a word. "Reserved." He looked around. "Anything else?"

Lucas opened his notebook and looked at a short list on the back page.

"I'd like to find out about doctors. Did any of these women see the same guy? Ruiz' doctor is a woman, but there may be a few male docs going through her gallery. She could have been picked up there, and we ought to check."

"We can check that," said Anderson.

"How about those change-of-address cards?"

"That's a problem," Anderson said. "We called the post office and they don't have cards for incoming people. Only people moving out. So if we want to check change-of-addresses for people coming to the Cities, we'd have to take the Cities and all the suburb names and go to every post office in the Southwest and check them."

"They're not computerized?"

"Nope. It's done at the local post offices."

"Dammit." Lucas looked at the chief. "What'd it take to check all the major cities down there, ten guys for three weeks? Something like that?"

"Three months is more like it," said Anderson. "I looked in the phone book and there are about eighty post-office branches just in the Minneapolis area, and that doesn't include St. Paul and the St. Paul suburbs. So then I looked at a map and the major cities we'd have to check, and I figure maybe two thousand post offices to cover just the bigger cities. And at each one, we'd have to check for all the different cities and suburbs up here. We'd be lucky if a guy could do three or four a day, even with good cooperation from the post offices."

"Maybe we could work through the post office," Daniel suggested. "Get a list of all the post offices, work out some kind of form they could fill out, and mail it to them. Explain how important it is, call all these places to make sure they're doing it…"

"If we did it that way, we could maybe do it with a couple, three guys full-time," said Anderson.

"They wouldn't have to be cops," Daniel said. "Work up a form and I'll talk to the post office. I'll send a couple of clerks over there to handle it."

"Driver's licenses," said one of the detectives.

"What?"

"If he just moved in, he probably had to get a new driver's license. They make you surrender your old one when you move in. The Public Safety people over at the state should have a record."

"Good," said Daniel. "We need that kind of thinking. Check that."

The detective nodded.

"Anything else?" he asked. "Lucas?"

Lucas shook his head.

"All right," said Daniel, "let's do it."

"Detective Davenport."

Lucas turned and saw her walking down the hall, Carla Ruiz, a smile on her face.

"Hi. What are you doing over here?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Divorce stuff. When I moved out of the house, my ex-husband was supposed to sell it and give me half the money. He never sold it and we're trying to get him moving."

"Unpleasant."

"Yeah. It just drags things out. I've been over here a half-dozen times. I'm tired of it."