Night Prey (14 page)

His voice was clear, controlled, his eyes focused.

"Somebody's cuttin' women," Lucas said. "I wanted to make sure it wasn't you."

"I cut some women, long time ago," Junky said. "There was this one, she had beautiful... you know. I made a grapevine on them."

"Yeah, I know."

"Long time ago; they liked it," he said.

Lucas shook his head.

"Somebody cuttin' on women?" Junky asked.

"Yeah, somebody's cuttin' on women."

After another moment of silence, Greave asked Junky, "Why would they do that? Why would he be cuttin' women?" In the distance, over the sound of the trucks moving toward the working edge of the fill, they could hear a siren. The fat man must have made it an emergency.

"You got to," Junky said solemnly to Greave. "If you don't cut them, especially the pretty ones, they get out of hand. You can't have women getting outa hand."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. You cut 'em, they stay put, that's for sure. They stay put."

"So why would you go a long time and not cut any women, then start cuttin' a lot of women?"

"I didn't do that," Junky said. He cast a defensive eye at Greave.

"No. The guy we're looking for did that."

Lucas looked on curiously as the man in the lavender Italian suit chatted with the man with no toes, like they were sharing a cappuccino outside a cafe.

"He just started up?" Junky asked.

"Yup."

Junky thought about that, pawing his face with his good hand, then his head bobbed, as though he'd worked it out. "'Cause a woman turns you on, that's why. Maybe you see a woman and she turns you on. Gets you by the pecker. You go around with your pecker up for a few days, and you gotta do something. You know, you gotta cut some women."

"Some woman turns you on?"

"Yup."

"So then you cut her."

"Well." Junky seemed to look inside himself. "Maybe not her, exactly. Sometimes you can't cut her. There was this one..." He seemed to drift away, lost in the past. Then: "But you gotta cut somebody, see? If you don't cut somebody, your pecker stays up."

"So what?"

"So what? You can't go around with your pecker up all the time. You can't."

"I wish I could," Greave cracked.

Junky got angry, intent, his face quivering. "You can't. You can't go around like that."

"Okay..."

The ambulance bumped into the landfill, followed a few seconds later by a sheriff's car.

"Come on, Junky, we're gonna put you in the hospital," Lucas said.

Junky said to Greave, pulling at Greave's pant leg with his good hand, "But you got to get her, sooner or later. Sooner or later, you got to get the one that put your pecker up. See, if she goes around putting your pecker up, anytime she wants, she's outa hand. She's just outa hand, and you gotta cut her."

"Okay..."

Lucas filed a complaint with the sheriff's deputy who followed the ambulance in, and Junky was hauled away.

"I'm glad I came with you," Greave said. "Got to see a dump, and a guy cutting himself up like a provolone."

Lucas shook his head and said, "You did pretty good back there. You've got a nice line of bullshit."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Talking to people, you know, that's half of homicide."

"I got the bullshit. It's the other part I ain't got," Greave said gloomily. "Listen, you wanna stop at my mystery apartment on the way back?"

"No."

"C'mon, man."

"We've got too much going on," Lucas said. "Maybe we'll catch some time later."

"They're wearing me out in homicide," Greave said. "I get these notes. They say, 'Any progress?' Fuck 'em."

Greave went on to homicide to check in, while Lucas walked down to Roux's office and stuck his head in.

"We picked up Junky Doog. He's clear, almost for sure."

He explained, and told her how Junky had mutilated himself. Roux, nibbling her lip, said, "What happens if I feed him to the Strib?"

"Depends on how you do it," Lucas said, leaning against the door, crossing his arms. "If you did it deep off-the-record, gave them just the bare information... it might take some heat off. Or at least get them running in a different direction. In either case, it'd be sorta cynical."

"Fuck cynical. His prior arrests were here in Hennepin, right?"

"Most of them, I think. He was committed from here. If you tipped them early enough, they could get across the street and pull his files."

"Even if it's bullshit, it's an exclusive. It's a lead story," Roux said. She rubbed her eyes. "Lucas, I hate to do it. But I'm taking some serious damage now. I figure I've got a couple of weeks of grace. After that, I might not be able to save myself."

Back at his office, a message was waiting on voice mail: "This is Connell. I got something. Beep me."

Lucas dialed her beeper number, let it beep, and hung up. Junky had been a waste of time, although he might be a bone they could throw the media. Not much of a bone...

With nothing else to do, he began paging through Connell's report again, trying to absorb as much of the detail as he could.

There were several threads that tied all the killings together, but the thread that worried him most was the simplicity of them. The killer picked up a woman, killed her, dumped her. They weren't all found right away-Connell suggested he might have kept one or two of them for several hours, or even overnight-but in one case, in South Dakota, the body was found forty-five minutes after the woman had been seen alive. He wasn't pressing his luck by keeping the woman around; they wouldn't get a break that way.

He didn't leave anything behind, either. The actual death scenes might have been in his vehicle-Connell suggested that it was probably a van or a truck, although he might have used a motel if he'd been careful in his choices.

In one case, in Thunder Bay, there may have been some semen on a dress, but the stain, whatever it was, had been destroyed in a failed effort to extract a blood type. A note from a cop said that it might have been salad dressing. DNA testing had not yet been available.

Vaginal and anal examinations had come up negative, but there was oral bruising that suggested that some of the women had been orally raped. Stomach contents were negative, which meant that he didn't ejaculate, ejaculated outside their mouth, or they lived long enough for stomach fluids to destroy the evidence.

Hair was a different problem. Foreign-hair samples had been collected from several of the bodies, but in most cases where hair was collected, several varieties were found. There was no way to tell that any particular hair came from the killer-or, indeed, that any of the hair was his. Connell had tried to get the existing hair samples cross-matched, but some of it had been either destroyed or lost, or the bureaucratic tangles were so intense that nothing had yet been done. Lucas made a note to search for hair crosses on Wannemaker and Joan Smits. All were relatively recent, with autopsies done by first-rate medical examiners.

Closing the file, Lucas got out of his chair and wandered around to stare sightlessly out the window, working it through his head. The man never left anything unique. Hair, so far, was the only possibility: they needed a match, and needed it badly. They had nothing else that would tie a specific man to a specific body. Nothing at all.

The phone rang. "This is Meagan. I've got somebody who remembers the killer..."

Chapter
8

Late in the afternoon, sun warm on the city sidewalks. Greave didn't want to go. "Look, I'm not gonna be much help to you. I don't know what you and Connell are into, where your heads are at-but I really want to do my own thing. And I already been to a fuckin' dump today."

"We need somebody else current with the case," Lucas said. "You're the guy. I want somebody else seeing these people, talking to them."

Greave rubbed his hair with both hands, then said, "All right, all right, I'll go along. But-if we've got time, we stop at my apartment, right?"

Lucas shrugged. "If we've got time."

Connell was waiting on a street corner in Woodbury, under a Quick Wash sign, wearing Puritan black-and-white, still carrying the huge purse. An automotive diagnostic center sprawled down the block.

"Been here long?" Greave asked. He was still pouting.

"One minute," she said. She was strung out, hard energy overlying a deep weariness. She'd been up all night, Lucas thought. Talking to the TV. Dying.

"Have you talked to St. Paul?" he asked.

"They're dead in the water," Connell said, impatience harsh in her voice. "The cop at the bookstore was one of theirs. He drinks too much, plays around on his wife. A guy over there told me that he and his wife have gotten physical. I guess one of their brawls is pretty famous inside the department-his wife knocked out two of his teeth with an iron, and he was naked chasing her around the backyard with a mop handle, drunk, bleeding all over himself. The neighbors called the cops. They thought she'd shot him. That's what I hear."

"So what do you think?"

"He's an asshole, but he's unlikely," she said. "He's an older guy, too heavy, out of shape. He used to smoke Marlboros, but quit ten years ago. The main thing is, St. Paul is covering like mad. They've been called out to his house a half-dozen times, but there's never been a charge."

Lucas shook his head, looked at the diagnosis center. "What about this woman?"

"Mae Heinz. Told me on the phone that she'd seen a guy with a beard. Short. Strong-looking."

Lucas led the way inside, a long office full of parts books, tires, cutaway muffler displays, and the usual odor of antifreeze and transmission fluid. Heinz was a cheerful, round-faced woman with pink skin and freckles. She sat wide-eyed behind the counter as Connell sketched in the murder. "I was talking to that woman," Heinz said. "I remember her asking the question..."

"But you didn't see her go out with a man?"

"She didn't," Heinz said. "She went out alone. I remember."

"Were there a lot of men there?"

"Yeah, there were quite a few. There was a guy with a ponytail and a beard and his name was Carl, he asked a lot of questions about pigs and he had dirty fingernails, so I wasn't too interested. Everybody seemed to know him. There was a computer guy, kind of heavyset blond, I heard him talking to somebody."

"Meyer," Connell said to Lucas. "Talked to him this morning. He's out."

"Kind of cute," Heinz said, looking at Connell and winking. "If you like the intellectual types."

"What about...?"

"There was a guy who was a cop," Heinz said.

"Got him," Lucas said.

"Then there were two guys there together, and I thought they might be gay. They stood too close to each other."

"Know their names?"

"No idea," she said. "But they were very well-dressed. I think they were in architecture or landscaping or something like that, because they were talking to the author about sustainable land use."

"And the guy with the beard," Connell said, prompting her.

"Yeah. He came in during the talk. And he must've left right away, because I didn't see him later. I sorta looked. Jesus-I could of been dead. I mean, if I'd found him."

"Was he tall, short, fat, skinny?"

"Big guy. Not tall, but thick. Big shoulders. Beard. I don't like beards, but I liked the shoulders." She winked at Connell again, and Lucas covered a grin by scratching his face. "But the thing is," she said to Connell, "you asked about smoking, and he snapped a cigarette into the street. I saw him do it. Snapped a cigarette and then came in the door."

Lucas looked at Connell and nodded. Heinz caught it. "Was that him?" she asked excitedly.

"Would you know him if we showed you a picture of him?" Lucas asked.

She cocked her head and looked to one side, as though she were running a video through her head. "I don't know," she said after a minute. "Maybe, if I saw an actual picture. I can remember the beard and the shoulders. His beard looked sort of funny. Short, but really dense, like fur... Kind of unpleasant, I thought. Maybe fake. I can't remember much about his face. Knobby, I think."

"Dark beard? Light?"

"Mmm... dark. Kind of medium, really. Pretty average hair, I think... brown."

"All right," Lucas said. "Let's nail this down. And let's get you with an artist. Do you have time to come to Minneapolis?"

"Sure. Right now? Let me tell my boss."

As the woman went to talk to her boss about leaving, Connell caught Lucas's sleeve. "Gotta be him. Smokes, arrives after the talk, then leaves right away. Wannemaker is lingering after the talk, but suddenly leaves, like somebody showed up."

"Wouldn't count on it," Lucas said. But he was counting on it. He felt it, just a sniff of the killer, just a whiff of the track. "We got to put her through the sex files."

The woman came back, animated. "Let's go. I'll follow you over."

Greave wanted to stop at the apartment complex so Lucas could look at the locked-room mystery. "C'mon, man, it's twenty fuckin' minutes. We'll be back before she's done with the artist," he said. A pleading note entered his voice. "C'mon, man, this is killing me."