“Five, usually?”
“Yesterday?”
“Yeah, five o’clock. Nothing down here after five.”
“Okay . . .” Lucas stepped back toward the door, then paused. Never hurt to ask the question. “What was the book you were looking at when I came in . . . if I might ask?”
The thin man was nervous. “Just a thriller.” He flashed it up and down.
“Could I look at it?” Lucas asked. He put a little thug into his voice. “I like thrillers.”
“Uhhh . . .” The thin man glanced at the store owner, who shrugged. The thin man said, reluctantly, “I guess.”
He handed over the book: Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Met O. “I read this guy,” Lucas said, flicking a finger at Block’s name. “Who’s O?” He flipped through the book: Was there something hidden inside?
As he did it, there was a quick intake of breath by the thin man, who said, “Please . . . you’ll break the binding. That’ll cut the value in half.”
“What’s special about it?” Lucas asked, frowning at the book. “It’s just a commercial—”
“Please.” The thin man took the book back, closed it carefully. His glasses had slipped down his thin nose, and he pushed them back up with a forefinger. He nearly whispered it: “Printed in France. An edition of five hundred in English, five hundred in French. A hundred dollars a copy at the press, they go for a thousand dollars now.”
“Well, maybe,” the store owner said. He was skeptical. “If you can find somebody to pay the thousand.”
“In a big metropolitan area . . .”
“There’s one right up north of us,” the owner said. “If you want to go try.”
Lucas: “What? It’s dirty or something?”
“No,” the thin man said, offended. “It’s sophisticated.”
“Huh. Who’s O?”
The thin man shook his head: “There was a famous book, The Story of O. If you haven’t read it . . . well, I can’t explain. You’d have to get into the literature.”
The owner changed the subject: “So what’s going on with the security camera?”
Lucas shrugged and let the book go. “We’re trying to find somebody who might have taken a picture of that phone across the street. Guy we’re looking for might have used it.”
The owner snapped his fingers, then pointed a finger-pistol at Lucas: “I’ve seen you. You were on TV. You’re looking for the killer, right? The crazy guy from Owatonna?”
Lucas nodded: “Yes.”
The owner looked out the window, as though Pope might suddenly pop up in the window, like a Punch puppet. “You think he made a call from across the street?”
“We think he might have. Last night, about eleven.”
The owner’s eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t here at eleven. Long gone. But have you talked to Mrs. Bird upstairs?”
“Mrs. Bird?”
“She sits up there and looks out the window all day and night,” the store owner said. “Says she’s waiting to die. If she didn’t die last night, she might’ve seen something.”
Lucas nodded: “Thanks. I’ll go ask.” As he went out the door, he looked back at the thin man with his Burglar book: “Sophisticated?”
The thin man nodded. “European.”
MRS. BIRD WAS TOO OLD to look thin—she looked wasted; she looked like she was going away for good. Lucas thought she might be ninety-five. She peeked at him over the chain on her door, pale blue curious eyes over lightly rouged cheeks. When Lucas showed her his ID, she opened the door.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken to a policeman . . .” She was a small woman with narrow shoulders, wrapped in a polyester housecoat printed to resemble a quilt, with peacocks and cockatoos on the quilt squares. She had short curly hair, like a poodle’s, but silvery white, and looked at Lucas through cat’s-eye glasses that might have been briefly fashionable in the fifties. A television rambled in the background, a shopping channel selling used Rolexes.
But she’d seen a man by the telephone. “I do remember that; yes. A man in a white shirt. That phone is not used very much.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?” Lucas asked. He edged inside the door; she apparently had three rooms, a living room overlooking the street, a bedroom, and a small kitchen. Lucas couldn’t see a bath, but he could see a half-open door in the bedroom, and thought that might be it. The place smelled of Glade deodorizer.
She frowned, was uncertain. “Well, I don’t know . . . He was only there for a minute or two.”
“Would you mind if I looked out the window?”
“Please do,” she said. He crossed her living room in three steps, looked out the window. The phone was directly across the street and only fifteen feet from a streetlight.
“Did you see more than one man last night?” Lucas asked.
“No, not last night,” she said.
“Did you see a car?”
Again she frowned. “Yes, I did. He got out of a car, he parked just over there . . .” She pointed a bony finger just up the street from the phone. “A white Oldsmobile.”
“An Oldsmobile.”
“I think so.”
“New? Or old.”
“New, I think.”
“You say, you’ve said, you think. You’ve said it several times . . .”
“I was watching television. That’s all I do now, watch television and look out the windows, except on Mondays and Wednesdays when the social lady comes and takes me to the store. But I wasn’t paying too much attention to the telephone . . .”
“Okay . . . If we showed you some photographs, could you see if you recognize the man? Or the car?”
She smiled; she had improbably small, white, pearly teeth. “I could certainly try, but I’m pretty old.”
“Mrs. Bird, I’ll be back in a minute, okay?” Lucas said. “Just give me a minute or two.”
“I’m not going anyplace. I hope.”
WHEN LUCAS GOT back to the street, Sloan was just coming out of the bookstore, wiping his nose with a Kleenex: “They said you were upstairs.”
“The woman upstairs said she saw a guy . . . I need your photo spread,” Lucas said.
“What else did she see?”
“She said he’s driving a white Oldsmobile. A new one,” Lucas said.
Sloan’s eyebrows went up. “That could be something.”
Sloan got his briefcase from the car and together they went back up the stairs. As they walked up the stairs, Lucas said, “Try not to get too close to her. You give her that cold, you could kill her.”
“Goddamnit.” Sloan was offended.
“No, no—I’m not kidding.”
MRS. BIRD OPENED THE DOOR for them. She was more animated now than when Lucas had first knocked; excited.
“We need a place for you to sit and look at these and see them all at once,” Sloan told her.
They all looked around. In the kitchen, a single wooden chair faced a small oval table the size of a pizza pan, and on the table, a paper rose poked out of a glass bud vase. Lucas and Sloan wouldn’t fit at the table.
“Could I move your end table around in front of the couch, maybe?” Lucas asked.
“Of course.”
Mrs. Bird sat in the middle of the three-cushion couch. Lucas took some old Reader’s Digests off the table and moved it in front of the couch. Lucas and Sloan sat on either side of Bird, and Sloan spread out ten five-by-seven color photographs. One of the men was Charlie Pope. The other nine, all of whom met the general description of Charlie Pope, were cops.
She looked at them for a moment, then said to Sloan, “I saw this on television once.”
“It’s pretty important . . .”
She looked back at the pictures, and then reached out and touched Charlie Pope’s face. “This is the man, I believe.”
THEY SAT LOOKING at the pictures for a few seconds, then Sloan said to Lucas, “We need to make out an affidavit and bring it back here.” Unspoken: the old lady might die
in the next fifteen minutes.
“We’ll get somebody with Rochester to do it, and we can bring it back here after the meeting.”
They explained the procedure to Mrs. Bird, who nodded and said, “I’ll wait for you. I was just going to watch TV anyway.” Then she did a little dramatic, girlish shiver: “You don’t think I’ll be in any danger, do you?”
Lucas thought, Not unless you shake hands with Sloan. But at the same time he smiled and shook his head, No.
12
ROCHESTER WAS A GOOD-SIZED CITY, built around a colony of doctors and wealthy patients, and probably had the highest per-capita income of any big city in the state. The money showed up in the government center, a modern red-brick, concrete, and glass building that sat on the Zumbro River a couple of blocks from the Mayo Clinic.
Twenty-nine sheriffs and police chiefs, or their alternates, along with a half dozen highway patrolmen, game wardens, and parole officers, got together in the boardroom, where the city council and county board met. Of the thirty-five, thirty were middle-aged men, most a little too heavy and going gray. The other five were women, all five tightly coifed and suited.
Lucas had talked to the Rochester chief about Bird; he would make arrangements for a formal statement. Then Lucas started the pitch to the gathered cops: “We know he’s down here someplace. You’ve all seen this morning’s Star-Tribune—he’s going to do it again. He’s probably already picked out somebody, and he’s stalking her. Or him. We’re looking for another guy from St. John’s named Mike West. We’re trying to keep this under our hats . . .”
They had questions, but Lucas had few answers: “Honest to God, we really don’t know what he’s doing, or how he’s hiding. There’s been a parole-violation bulletin out on him for a month, and we’ve got nothing. He’s buried himself someplace. We need to pry him out of his hole.”
He told them about the white Olds. They all made a note. One guy held up a hand: “A new white Olds . . . they stopped building Oldsmobiles . . .”
“I know.”
“We should be able to track every one of them,” the guy suggested.
“We’re doing that,” Lucas said. “The woman who gave us that information is elderly, really elderly, and we’re not absolutely sure of its quality.”
“You’re not sure how he’s armed?”
“No, but he says he is, he says he got some guns, and we believe him,” Lucas said. “Rice was in pretty good shape. We don’t think Pope would have taken him bare-handed. The medical examiner says all of the damage to Rice’s body was inflicted either with the whip or a blade. He didn’t show any signs of being beaten, or having been in a struggle before he was tied up. So there was probably a gun. If one of your guys even gets a whiff of Pope, he better be wearing a vest.”
“Pretty goodamn hot out in the countryside right now,” one of the cops said.
“Better hot than dead,” somebody else said.
Another hand: “Where’d he get the guns?”
“Same place he got the Olds,” Lucas said. “We don’t know.”
“We know he was in Rochester last night?”
“Three blocks from here,” Lucas said. He gestured out the window at his back. “Right across the river.”
And it went on for a while.
WHEN THEY BROKE UP, Sloan came over and said, “I’m feeling like shit, man. Bobby Anderson from Scott County’s here. He said he’d give me a ride back home, if you’re gonna go see Marcia Pope.”
Lucas nodded: “You look bad. I can’t believe the Marcia Pope thing is going anywhere, anyway. The Austin cops already talked to her twice.”
Sloan took off, and Lucas, back in the truck, headed south toward the Iowa border, and the city of Austin.
MARCIA POPE LIVED IN a shingle-sided cottage on a tree-shaded street on the edge of Austin, in a subdivision built by meatpackers. The house was technically white, but probably hadn’t been painted in forty years; the siding was grooved with dirt and mold, the ragged grass had only been fitfully mown, the narrow sidewalk leading to the front door was cracked and twisted.
Lucas pulled into the gravel patch that served as a driveway, and as he got out of the car, saw the curtains twitch. Until that moment, it hadn’t really occurred to him that Charlie Pope might be inside. Could Charlie be stupid enough to hide out at his mother’s? And here was Lucas going to the front door, no protective vest, his pistol tucked in a spot that might be a half second too slow, his mind working on other errands.
He slowed, scratched his face, miming a man who’d forgotten something, went back to the truck, pulled his gun out, and tucked it into his side pants pocket. The front sight had been smoothed to prevent hangups, and he kept the hammer and trigger assembly hanging out so his hand would fall on them.
Which wouldn’t do him a lot of good, he thought, as he started back up the sidewalk, if Charlie was waiting behind the door with a shotgun stoked with double-ought buckshot . . . He saw the curtain twitch again and thought, Why would he wait until I got to the door?
GOOD THOUGHT. But nothing happened on the way up, and at the door he stepped to one side and rang the bell. A few seconds passed, and he rang it again; then the door jerked open an inch or two, and a woman asked, “Whattaya want?”
He felt like a Fuller Brush salesman, but put on his official cop voice: “Mrs. Marcia Pope?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m Lucas Davenport with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” He held up his ID with his left hand. “We’re looking for your son, Charlie. Is he here?”
“No, he’s not here. I haven’t seen him in more’n a month. I don’t know where he is. I’ve already talked to the Austin police.”
All he could see was one eye, a hank of steel gray hair, and the end of a short, pointed nose. “I need to interview you. Open up.”
“You got a warrant?” The door opened two more inches, the better to argue.
“No, but I could get one. Then we’d come back, put handcuffs on you so all the neighbors could enjoy themselves, and take you to police headquarters to talk.”
Silence, three seconds, five seconds. “You’re not going to take me if I talk to you now?”
“Not if you tell me the truth,” Lucas said. “Charlie’s not here?”
The door opened wide enough that he could see her. She was a small, hatchet-faced woman wearing black slacks and a blue blouse that looked like a uniform from a chain restaurant. “I ain’t seen that boy since the Fourth of July. He came down on the bus to see the fireworks. He always loved them.”
Lucas nodded: “Can I come in?”
“The house is a mess,” she said reluctantly. “I’ve been working all the time . . .”
But she backed up and he stepped inside.
SHE HAD A TV, a beat-up couch, a green La-Z-Boy, and a couple of end tables in the living room. Everything was stacked with magazines and tabloid newspapers; even more paper was stacked against the walls; decades of Us and People. The room smelled of fried meat and Heinz 57 Sauce.
Pope seemed to be looking for a place for Lucas to sit, but he said, “Never mind, I’m okay . . .” He eased toward the kitchen: more magazines, but no sound, or feel, or anything that indicated another person around. They stood facing each other and Lucas pushed her for names of friends, anything that might point to where Pope had gone.
“He had to have friends from high school . . .”
“He wasn’t in high school that long. There was one boy, in grade school, but he drownded.”
In the end, it seemed that she’d hardly known her child. When he was twelve, she said, he started skipping school. She didn’t know where he spent his days; he simply went somewhere and hid. The school authorities hunted him down at the end of every summer, but as soon as his enrollment was counted for the state aid, they let him go. He was a pain in the ass, and always had been.
The high point of his teen years had come when he’d crashed his bike, hitting his head on a curb.
“
They thought he was gonna die, but he didn’t; goddamn brains almost squirted out his ear,” his mother said.
In eleventh grade, Charlie Pope stopped pretending. He quit school, got a job at a McDonald’s, was fired. “Never washed his hands after the bathroom, they said.” He did some more time at a Burger King, was fired again, and then did whatever kind of pickup work he could get, lived however he could, Marcia said.
“His old man took off thirty years ago. Nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing. He was a worthless piece of shit anyhow, but I didn’t know that when I took up with him,” Marcia said. “I was just a girl.”
“So there’s nobody—nobody ever talked to Charlie.”
She looked away from him for a moment, her forehead wrinkling. Then, “You know, there was them brothers from over by Hill. He was talking about them on the Fourth, maybe they’d have a summer job for him. He didn’t like hauling garbage . . . What was their name? I can’t think . . .”
“What about them?”
“They’re farmers. They got these big gardens, Charlie says. They live in the country somewhere by Hill, they sell tomatoes and corn and cukes and stuff down on the highway somewhere,” she said. “One of them vegetable stands. They use to hire Charlie to work in the gardens . . . you know, pickin’ shit and pulling weeds and they had one of those machines, like a lawnmower, but it plows . . .”
“A tiller?”
“That’s it. They taught him how to run it and he’d help with the gardens. He did that for a couple of summers. He liked it.”
A little tingle: “This was where? By Hill? That’s a town?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah. Hill.”
“You don’t know their names?”
“No . . . I mean I used to. I seen one of the boys, once, he had one of those things on his face and neck, a raspberry thing, I think they call them? Or a strawberry thing? One of those like birthmarks, great big one on the side of his face . . .”