bet the schools wouldn’t even have a record of that. ’Cause they never would have actually fired him-he’d just be sent off. We’d have to go somewhere else to get his name. Like, you know, teachers’ college or something.”
Lucas wagged a finger at him: “That’s decent. Not great, but it’s decent. I’ll get Sandy on that first thing in the morning.”
At one o’clock, they hadn’t thought of much else, and Del finally went home. “You gonna be okay?” he asked, in the doorway.
“Hell no,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna be screwed up for a while.”
“You got some people worried about you,” Del said. “We don’t want you doing anything goofy.”
“Jeez, have a little faith,” Lucas said. “I’m screwed up, but I’m not nuts.”
When Del was gone, Lucas went back to the den and gathered up all the papers, scanned them, sighed, and thought that the information was too thin. They had his voice… but it told them nothing, until they could find him. Once they had him, it might mean something.
Same thing with his face-maybe Barker could identify him, and Todd Barker had stood within inches of him, and might be able to identify him, but they had to find him first. And once they found him, the DNA from the blood was really all they’d need.
The problem was finding him.
Lucas was stuffing the two tapes back in his briefcase when a thought struck him. There was nothing in the voice, but what about the timing of the calls? He checked the times, then went back to his notes, and the summarized notes from other investigators. The summaries weren’t enough to be sure, but the tips on Scrape and his whereabouts seemed to come precisely when the investigation was slowing because of a lack of information.
That is, when they were looking for Scrape, they got a tip on where he lived. It hadn’t been used, because by the time they got it, Lucas had already located him.
But then Scrape was released, and they promptly got a tip on the box of clothing that had been thrown in the dumpster, and the tip had paid off with what looked like the definitive case against the street guy.
Both tips from the killer himself.
As though the killer himself had been inside the investigation.
Lucas reached up and turned off his over-the-shoulder reading lamp, and closed his eyes in the now darkened den.
Once, years before, he’d been a Minneapolis police lieutenant loosely assigned to special investigations and intelligence work. At the time, a serial killer simply known in the newspapers as the “Maddog” had been killing women around the Twin Cities, in particularly brutal ways. The case turned on a pistol that had been stolen from an evidence box in the police department-an evidence box to which Lucas had had access.
Early in the investigation, Lucas had been put under surveillance by Internal Affairs, with the thought that he might have been the killer. That had been quickly cleared up, when one of the murders took place while he was actively being watched.
But he’d been roundly pissed off, until the chief explained the circumstances-about the missing gun, about a profiler who said that the killer would be attractive to women, and charming, and probably a nice dresser, whose dress would bring women to trust him… a description that fit Lucas.
Could this killer be a cop? Buster Hill said that the shooter at the Barkers’ house had been using a Glock, a fairly nondescript piece of weaponry that was also a common police sidearm in the Twin Cities area.
He’d known cops who were killers, but they were not common.
He hated to think that a Minneapolis cop might have been one. Given the age of Fell, he’d almost have to be a patrolman, and Lucas knew all the young patrolmen at the time. He couldn’t think of any who’d really fit both the personality and the appearance of Fell….
Well: maybe one or two.
He’d think about it overnight.
Try to sleep on it.
Try to sleep on it-he hardly slept at all. Kept flashing back to Marcy. Weather always got up first, and did this morning. As soon as she got out of the bathroom, he rolled out of bed.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“Can’t stop thinking about possibilities,” he said. “I might as well get going. I want to check and make sure that poster got out to the TV stations. And I got a couple of things I want to look at over at Minneapolis.”
“Good luck,” she said. “Be careful.”
18
When the killer had turned from the Barkers’ doorway, he’d been confused by the crowd in the house, by the noise, and even by the gunfire itself, though he was doing the shooting, then by the sight of the cop coming out with the gun. Nothing rational was working through his brain: he was down on the lizard level, banging away as fast as he could, both scared and furious and righteous.
He saw one or two people going down and the muzzle flash from a pistol and then, as he turned, felt an impact under his armpit. He was confused about what it was, felt like somebody had hit him with a thrown rock, a sharp rock-and then he was around the house and running between houses, stuffing the pistol in his pants pocket, and across the neighbor’s backyard, between more houses out to the street and into the van.
His heart pounding, he’d cleared the neighborhood in little more than a minute, turning corners, heading out to I-494. His arm didn’t hurt that much, but when he scratched at it, his other hand came away covered with blood and he realized he’d been shot or had cut himself, or something.
He freaked. One thing he didn’t like was the sight of his own blood. He was weaving around the highway, trying to see where it was coming from, then thought about the highway patrol-it’d be ridiculous, at this point, if he were pulled over by the highway patrol for drunk driving.
He swerved onto an exit, across the highway into a shopping center, parked in front of a Best Buy, and looked at his arm. Lots of blood. He probed at it, realized there was nothing there. He hadn’t been hit in the arm at all, but in the side, near the pit of his arm.
He checked the parking lot, then carefully peeled up his shirt and found the wound. To his eye, it looked almost like a knife cut, straight, but deep and ragged. Not a hole, but a slice.
Not too bad, he thought; not too bad, but still bleeding.
He saw a newspaper stand outside a bagel place, dug some change out of his parking-meter stash, looked around again, hopped out of the van, walked over to the box, and bought a Star Tribune.
He’d once read that the inside pages of newspapers were fairly sterile. The pages were made with acidic wood pulp, with lots of heat in the process, and were untouched by human hands. He hoped it was true. He carried the paper back to the van, got inside, pulled out the sports pages, and used them to pad his armpit.
Needed to get home…
The beard was bothering him-and he wondered if the cops had put out a thing about a white van and a black beard. He pulled it off, the adhesive stretching the skin around his mouth and nose, pushed it down between the seats of the van. He looked in the mirror: still had adhesive on his face. He peeled it for a moment, then put the van in gear and headed out.
If only…
Most of his life seemed built on the phrase. If only…
If only the apartment building had been put somewhere else, if only the Jones girls hadn’t been found. If only those things had happened, the old man would still be alive, and he’d still be peacefully pursuing his junk, building his stash for another trip to Thailand.
