ELLE.
Lucas decided that he needed to talk to her in person. He stopped at his office, saw Del, Jenkins, and Shrake gathered around his desk. Carol stopped him in the outer office and said, 'You need to fill in some paper on the guys in the co-op center. It can't wait, and I don't know the answers; payroll needs it an hour ago.'
As he filled in, signed, and initialed the papers, he could hear the three cops talking through the open door of his office; they were talking about Sloan: 'He's got the angst,' Jenkins said in his gravelly voice.
'I thought it was the Zeitgeist,' Shrake drawled.
Del said, 'I thought angst was the Zeitgeist.'
After a pause, somebody said, in a midwestern male version of valley-girl-speak, 'Well, duh.'
LUCAS, A LITTLE PISSED, signed the last of the documents, stepped into his office, and said with a little heat, 'Off Sloan's back, for Christ's sake. He's fucked up.'
'Hey,' Del said. 'He's our friend, too.'
'All right.' Lucas bobbed his head and backed off: 'Sorry: I got a problem. It's biting me. You three gotta find Mike West. Del: Jenkins and Shrake will fill you in.They've looked, came up empty, but now: this is critical.'
'What about Pope?' Shrake asked.
'We're working on a two-man theory,' Lucas lied. 'We need West.'
'There wasn't much…,' Jenkins began.
'Fuck that. Roust people. Everybody. Take your saps with you,' Lucas said.
Jenkins's eyebrows were up. 'You're serious.'
Lucas was cold as ice: 'Find that fucker. I want you to find him today. You want to know why, ask Crime Scene for some photos of Carlita Peterson.'
'We heard about that,' Del said.
'Look at the pictures. Then get out there. And fuck that take-it-easy shit,' Lucas said.
TEN MINUTES TO ST. ANNE'S. Lucas parked in an illegal spot, threw a 'Police' card on his dashboard, and hustled across campus. The Psychology Department secretary told him that Elle was having office hours and invited him to wait. He sat outside Elle's door, in a wooden chair of solid brown oak, watching the college girls coming and going in their summer clothes, big and blond and athletic, Minnesota Catholics.
He waited for ten minutes before Elle's door opened, and another blond Catholic girl popped out, carrying a stack of books. Elle was a couple of steps beside her, saw Lucas, and said, 'Oh, no-what happened?'
'We gotta talk,' Lucas said.
HE TOLD HER about the discovery of Pope's body, and about Peterson, about the chase the night before, about the phone call, about the hanging stand. She sat silently, intent, nodding, leaning toward him, her rimless glasses glittering in the overhead fluorescents.
When he finished, she said, 'Yes. He is intelligent. He is a planner. He is daring. This is the man I told you about.'
'And that's all you've got to say.'
'I can't give you his fingerprints, Lucas. I can tell you that he is probably physically attractive, in some way, enough to attract the interest of single women. He won't stop… and I'd say that something happened to him, to trigger him… To get him started on this.'
'Like what? You mean, like he was in a car wreck and smacked his head and came out crazy?'
She smiled at him: 'No. But something made him start. Something exposed him to a trigger. Oh, one other thing: I think, because the two women were markedly different in age, that he most likely is between them in age-young enough to attract the younger women, old enough to interest the older woman.'
They talked for a few more minutes about the killer, and then Lucas switched the topic to Sloan: 'His old lady says he's depressed. Maybe cycling down.'
'Your job will do that. You should know that, of all people.'
Lucas had suffered through a clinical depression a few years earlier; it hadn't recurred, though on bad days, he could still feel the beast out there.
'He's thinking about retiring,' Lucas said.
'Might not be a bad idea. Retirement can sometimes trigger depression, but in Sloan's case… Your job is too much. Not many people can take it, and those who can, if they do it long enough, can start to lose it,' she said. 'They self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. Or they turn into monsters. This is all very complicated, Lucas. Sloan's wife should get him to a doctor if he really gets down.'
'I'll get him to go, if he seems like he's falling off the edge,' Lucas said. 'He knows what happened to me-and I've told him that if I ever go back down, I'm going on the pills. I'm not gonna try to sweat it out again.'
'That was so foolish…,' she said.
'I don't like the idea of chemicals messing with my brain.'
'When you're depressed, chemicals are messing with your brain,' she said. 'You're just using other chemicals to fight back.'
'Yeah, Yeah… ' Lucas's cell phone rang. 'That's probably Sloan now.'
HE MET SLOAN at the Odyssey, a Greek beer joint and pool hall near the Lake Street Bridge on the Minneapolis side of the Mississippi. Sloan did look tired; Lucas suggested a round of nine ball might wake him up, but Sloan shook his head. 'Don't have the edge,' he said. 'I could use a beer.'
They got a couple of Leinies long necks and carried them to a booth. A couple of hard-looking guys were shooting pool in the back, leather vests, oily jeans, fat leather wallets sticking out of their back pockets, tied to their belts with brass chains. They looked dirty, as they should: they were Minneapolis intelligence cops, and they ignored Lucas and Sloan.
Sloan said, 'Okay, so something's up. What is it?'
Lucas said, 'Some fishermen down in Le Sueur County snagged a body in the Minnesota River. Actually, all they got was a piece of a hand. Scuba divers brought up the rest of the body, big chain wrapped around it. Medical examiner said the guy'd been in the river for a month.'
Sloan jumped to a conclusion: 'Another Rice thing? He did a guy first?'
'No. It was, uh, Charlie Pope.'
SLOAN LOOKED AT HIM for a long time over the beer; he seemed almost amused. And smiling, he said, 'You gotta be shitting me.'
'I said that exact same thing to another guy about an hour ago.'
Sloan took a pull on the long neck, smacked his lips, sighed, and said, 'I'm gonna fuckin' quit.'
'I talked to Elle when I couldn't get you. She says this clears up the confusion. The guy we're looking for is smart, organized, probably good-looking. Probably in his thirties…'
He ran down the rest of it for Sloan, who then asked, 'But what about Mrs.Bird? She saw Pope standing by that wall phone.'
'I thought about that,' Lucas said. Then, 'We did it.'
'Huh?'
'We contaminated her. That's the only thing I can think of.'
Sloan pulled his feet into the booth, onto the seat, closed his eyes, thinking, and finally, reluctantly, nodded. 'All she did all day was watch TV. Nobody ever came to visit her. Pope's picture was on TV every fifteen minutes. So then we came with my photo book, and we treated her like she was important, and she looked in the book and sure enough…'
'She sees a familiar face, and picks it out,' Lucas said. 'That doesn't mean she didn't see somebody on the
