Lucas Davenport Novels 6-10

  He took his face away from the eyepiece, dropped well below the level of the vent, lit a Camel in his carefully cupped hand, and looked down at the metal surface under his arm. He was not introspective, but now he thought: What’s going on? He was breathing hard, as though he’d been on the stair climber. He was beginning to feel some kind of burn . . . Goddamn. He squeezed his eyes shut, imagined catching her on the street, getting her in the truck.

  But then he’d have to do her. He frowned at the thought. And then he wouldn’t have this. He peered over the top of the vent; she was still out of sight, and he dropped back on his elbow. He liked this. He needed this time with her. Eventually, he’d have to get with her. He could see that. But for now . . .

  He peeked back over the edge. She was still out of sight, and he took two more hurried drags on the cigarette and ground it out. Another peek, and he lit another Camel.

  When Sara Jensen finally emerged from the bathroom, she was nude except for a white terry-cloth towel wrapped around her head; she looked like a dark angel. She wasn’t hurried, but she was moving with deliberation. Going somewhere, Koop thought, his heart pounding, his mouth dry. She was bouncing, her nipples large and dark, pubic hair black as coal. She took something from the same dressing table where he’d found the jewelry box—the box wasn’t there anymore, and he wondered briefly where she’d put it—then sat on the bed and began trimming her toenails.

  He groped in his pocket for the sixty-power eyepiece, made the switch. The new lens put him within a foot of her face: she was trimming her nails with a fierce concentration, wrinkles in her forehead and in the flesh along her sides, foot pulled within a few inches of her nose. She carefully put each clipping aside, on the bedspread. He let the scope drop to her legs; she was sitting sideways to him, her far leg pulled up; her navel was an “innie”; her pubic hair seemed artificially low. She probably wore a bikini in the summer. She had a small white scar on her near knee. On her hip, a tattoo? What? No, a birthmark, he thought. Or a bruise.

  She finished with the far foot, and lifted the near one. From his angle on the roof, he could see just the curve of her vulva, with a bit of hair. He closed his eyes and swallowed, opened them again. He went back to her hip: definitely a birthmark. To her breasts, back to the pubic hair, to her face: she was so close, he could almost feel the heat from her.

  When she finished with her foot, she gathered the trimmed nails in the palm of her hand and carried them out of sight into the bathroom. Again she was gone for a while, and when she came back, the towel was no longer wrapped around her head and her hair fell on her shoulders, frizzy, coiled, still damp.

  She took her time finding a nightgown; walked around nude for a while, apparently enjoying it. When she finally pulled a nightgown out of her dresser, Koop willed her naked for just another second. But she pulled the nightgown over her head, facing him, and her body disappeared in a slow white erotic tumble of cotton. He closed his eyes: he simply couldn’t take it. When he opened them, she was buttoning the gown at the neck; so virginal now, when just a moment before . . .

  “No . . .” A single dry word, almost a moan. Go back, start over . . . Koop needed something. He needed a woman, was what he needed.

  KOOP PUT SARA Jensen to bed before he left, developing the same sense of loss he always felt when he left her; but this time he closed his eyes, saw her again. He waited a half hour, looking at nothing but darkness; when he finally dropped off the air conditioner and took the stairs, he could barely remember doing it. He just suddenly found himself in the street, walking toward the truck.

  And the pressure was intense. The pressure was always there, but sometimes it was irresistible, even though it put his life in jeopardy.

  Koop climbed into the truck, took Hennepin Avenue back toward the loop, then slid into the side streets, wandering aimlessly around downtown. He ran Sara Jensen behind his eyes like a movie. The curve of her leg, the little pink there . . . Thought about buying a bottle. He could use a drink. He could use several. Maybe find John, pick up another eight-ball. Get an eight-ball and a bottle of Canadian Club and a six-pack of 7-Up, have a party. . . .

  Maybe he should go back. Maybe she’d get up and he could see her again. Maybe he could call her number on a cellular phone, get her up . . . but he didn’t have a cellular phone. Could he get one? Maybe she’d undress again . . . He shook himself. Stupid. She was asleep.

  KOOP SAW THE girl as he passed the bus station. She had a red nylon duffel bag by her feet and she was peering down the street. Waiting for a bus? Koop went by, looked her over. She was dark-haired, a little heavy, with a round, smooth, unblemished face. If you squinted, she might be Jensen; and she had the look he always sought in the bookstores, the passivity. . . .

  Impulsively, he did a quick around-the-block, dumped the truck behind the station, started into the station, turned, ran back to the truck, opened the back, pulled out the toolbox, closed up the truck, and went through the station.

  The girl was still standing at the corner, looking down Hennepin. She turned when she sensed him coming, gave him the half-smile and the shifting eyes that he saw from women at night, the smile that said, “I’m nice, don’t hurt me,” the eyes that said, “I’m not really looking at you. . . .”

  He toted the heavy toolbox past her, and she looked away. A few feet farther down, he stopped, put a frown on his face, turned and looked at her.

  “Are you waiting for a bus?”

  “Yes.” She bobbed her head and smiled. “I’m going to a friend’s in Upper Town.”

  “Uptown,” he said. She wasn’t from Minneapolis. “Uh, there aren’t many buses at this time of night. I don’t even know if they run to Uptown . . . Can your friend come and get you?”

  “He doesn’t have a phone. I’ve only got his address.”

  Koop started away. “You oughta catch a cab,” he said. “This is kind of a tough street. There’re hookers around here, you don’t want the cops thinking. . . .”

  “Oh, no . . .” Her mouth was an O, eyes large.

  Koop hesitated. “Are you from Minnesota?”

  She really wasn’t sure about talking to him. “I’m from Worthington.”

  “Sure, I’ve been there,” Koop said, trying a smile. “Stayed at a Holiday Inn on the way to Sioux Falls.”

  “I go to Sioux all the time,” she said. Something in common. She’d held her arms crossed over her stomach as they talked; now she dropped them to her sides. Opening up.

  Koop put the toolbox on the sidewalk. “Look, I’m a maintenance guy with Greyhound. You don’t know me, but I’m an okay guy, really. I’m on my way to South Minneapolis, I could drop you in Uptown. . . .”

  She looked at him closely now, afraid but tempted. He didn’t look that bad: tall, strong. Older. Had to be thirty.

  “I was told that the bus . . .”

  “Sure.” He grinned again. “Don’t take rides from strangers. That’s a good policy. If you stick close to the bus stop and the station, you should be okay,” he said. “I wouldn’t go down that way, you can see the porno stores. There’re weirdos going in and out.”

  “Porno stores?” She looked down the street. A black guy was looking in the window of a camera store.

  “Anyway, I gotta go,” Koop said, picking up his toolbox. “Take it easy. . . .”

  “Wait,” she said, her face open, fearful but hoping. She picked up the duffel. “I’ll take the ride, if it’s okay.”

  “Sure. I’m parked right behind the station,” Koop said. “Let me get my tools stowed away . . . You’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “This is my first time in Minneapolis,” the girl said, now chatty. “But I used to go up to Sioux every weekend, just about.”

  “What’s your name?” Koop asked.

  “Marcy Lane,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  “Ben,” he said. “Ben Cooper.”

  Ben was a nice name. Like Gentle Ben, the bear, on television. “Nice to meet you, Ben,” she s
aid, and tried a smile, a kind of bohemian, woman-of-the-road smile.

  She looked like a child.

  A pie-faced kid from the country.

  10

  WEATHER HEARD THE phone at the far end of the house, woke up, poked him.

  “Phone,” she mumbled. “It must be for you.”

  Lucas fumbled around in the dark, found the bedroom phone, picked it up. Dispatch patched him through to North Minneapolis. Another one.

  “. . . recovered her purse and a duffel bag with some clothes. We got a license, says she’s Marcy Lane with an address in Worthington,” Carrigan said. His voice sounded like a file being run over sheet metal. “We’re trying to run her folks down now. You better get your ass over here.”

  “Did you call Lester?” Lucas was sitting on the bed, hunched in the light from the bedside lamp, bare feet on the floor. Weather was still awake, unmoving, listening to the conversation over her shoulder.

  “Not yet. Should I?”

  “I’ll call him,” Lucas said. “Freeze every fuckin’ thing. Freeze it. The shit’s gonna hit the fan, and you don’t want any mistakes. And don’t talk to the uniforms, for Christ’s sakes.”

  “It’s froze hard,” Carrigan said.

  “Keep it that way.” Lucas poked the phone’s Cancel button, then redialed.

  “Who’s dead?” Weather asked, rolling onto her back.

  “Some kid. Looks like our asshole did it,” Lucas said. The dispatcher came on and he said, “This is Davenport. I need a number for a Meagan Connell. And I need to talk to Frank Lester. Now.”

  They found a number for Connell and he scribbled it down. As they put him through to Lester, he grinned at Weather, sleepy-eyed, looking up at him. “How often do they call you in the middle of the night?” she asked. “When you’re working?”

  “Maybe twenty times in twenty years,” he said.

  She rolled toward her nightstand, looked at the clock. “I get up in three hours.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She propped herself up on one elbow and said, “I never thought of it until now, but you’ve got very little hair on your ass.”

  “Hair?” The phone was ringing at the other end, and he looked down at his ass, confused. A sleepy Lester grunted, “Hello?”

  “This is Davenport,” Lucas said, going back to the phone, trying to get his mind off hair. “Carrigan just called. A young girl from Worthington got gutted and dumped in a vacant lot up on the north side. If it ain’t the one that did Wannemaker, it’s his twin brother.”

  After a moment of silence, Lester said, “Shit.”

  “Yeah. So now we got a new one. You better get with Roux and figure out what you’re gonna do, publicity-wise.”

  “I’ll call her. Are you going up there? Wherever?”

  “I’m on my way,” Lucas said.

  LUCAS HUNG UP, then dialed the number for Connell. She picked it up, her voice a weak croak: “Hello?”

  “This is Davenport,” he said. “A girl from out in the country just got killed and dumped up on the north side. It looks like it’s our guy.”

  “Where?” Wide-awake now. Lucas gave her the address. “I’ll see you there.”

  Lucas hung up, hopped out of bed, and headed for the bathroom. “You were going to observe tomorrow,” Weather said.

  Lucas stopped, turned back. “Oh, jeez, that’s right. Listen. If I finish up out there, I’ll come over to the hospital. You’re starting at seven-thirty?”

  “Yes. That’s when the kid’s coming in.”

  “I can make that,” he said. “Where do I go?”

  “Ask at the front desk. Tell them the operating suite, and when you get up there, ask for me. They’ll be expecting you.”

  “I’ll try,” he said. “Seven-thirty.”

  CARRIGAN’S SECOND CLAIM to fame was that he had small, fine feet, with which he danced. He had once appeared on stage at the Guthrie, in a modern interpretation of Othello, wearing nothing but a gold lamé jock and a headband.

  His third claim to fame was that when a rookie had referred to him as a fag dancer, he’d held the rookie’s head in a locker-room toilet for so long that homicide submitted the kid’s name to the Guinness Book of Records for the longest free dive. The claim was noted, but rejected.

  Carrigan’s first claim to fame was that a decade earlier, he’d twice won the NCAA wrestling title at 198 pounds. Nobody fucked with him.

  “Couldn’t have been too long ago,” he told Lucas, looking back at the crowd gathering on the corner. Carrigan was black, as was most of the crowd gathered across the street. “There was some people up here playing ball until dark, and there was no body then. Some kids cuttin’ across the park found her a little after one o’clock.”

  “Anybody see any vehicles?”

  “We’ve got people going door to door across the park there, but I don’t think we’ll get much. There’s an interstate entrance just down the block and it’s easy to miss it; people come in here to turn around and go back, so there’s cars in and out all the time. Nobody pays any attention. Come on, take a look.”

  The body was still uncovered, lying on bare ground between a couple of large bushes. The bushes lined a bank that ran parallel to the third-base line on a softball field. Whoever had killed her didn’t care if she was found; he must have realized that she’d be found almost immediately. Portable lights illuminated the area around the body, and a crime-scene crew was working it over. “Look for cigarettes,” Lucas told Carrigan. “Unfiltered Camels.”

  “Okay. . . .”

  Lucas squatted next to the dead girl. She was lying on her side, twisted, her head and shoulders facing down, her hips half-turned toward the sky. Lucas could see enough of the wound to tell that it was identical to Wannemaker’s: a stab and a disemboweling rip. He could smell the body cavity. . . . “Nasty,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah,” Carrigan said sourly.

  “Can I move her?”

  “What for?”

  “I want to roll her back and look at her chest,” Lucas said.

  “If you want to—we got photos and all,” Carrigan said. “But there’s blood all over her, you better use gloves. Hang on. . . .” He came back a moment later with a pair of thin yellow plastic gloves and handed them to Lucas. Lucas pulled them on, took the woman by the arm, and rolled her back.

  “Look at this,” Lucas said. He pointed at two bloody squiggles on her breast. “What do they look like?”

  “Letters. An S and a J,” Carrigan said, shining a pen-light on the girl’s body. “Kiss my rosy red rectum. What is this shit, Davenport?”

  “Insanity,” Lucas said as he studied the body.

  A moment later, Carrigan said, “Who’s this?”

  Lucas looked over his shoulder and saw Connell striding toward them, wrapped in a raincoat. “My aide,” he said.

  “Your fuckin’ what?”

  “Is it him?” Connell asked, coming up. Lucas stood up and stripped off the gloves.

  “Yeah. Cut the SJ into her,” Lucas said. He crooked his head back and looked up at the night sky, the faint stars behind the city lights. The guy had pissed him off. Somehow, Wannemaker didn’t reach him so personally; this kid did. Maybe because he could still feel the life in her. She hadn’t been dead long.

  “He’s out of his pattern,” Connell said.

  “Fuck pattern. We know he did Wannemaker,” Lucas said. “The girl up north didn’t have the letters cut into her.”

  “But she was on schedule,” Connell said. “Wannemaker and this one, these are two that are out of order. I hope we don’t have two guys.”

  “Nah.” Lucas shook his head. “The knife in the stomach, man, it’s a signature. More than the letters, even.”

  “I better look at her,” Connell said. She crept under the bushes for a better look, squatted next to the body, turned the light on it. She studied it for a minute, then two, then walked away to spit. Came back. “I’m getting used to it,” she said.

&n
bsp; “God help you,” said Carrigan.

  A patrolman and a tall black kid were walking fast up the block, the kid a half-step ahead of the patrolman. The kid wore knee shorts, an oversize shirt, Sox hat, and an expression of eye-rolling exasperation.

  Carrigan took a step toward them. “What you got, Bill?”

  “Kid saw the guy,” the patrolman said. “Sure enough.”

  Lucas, Connell, and Carrigan gathered around the kid. “You see him?”

  “Man . . .” The kid looked up the block, where more people were wandering in, attracted by word of a murder.

  “What’s your name?” Connell asked.

  “Dex?” The answer sounded like a question, and the kid’s eyes rolled up to the sky.

  “How long ago?” Lucas asked.

  The kid shrugged. “Do I look like a large fuckin’ clock?”

  “You’re gonna look like a large fuckin’ scab if you don’t watch your mouth,” Carrigan said.

  Lucas held up a hand, got close to the kid. “This is a farm girl, Dex. Just came up to the city, somebody let the air out of her.”

  “Ain’t got nothin’ to do with me,” Dex said, looking at the crowd again.

  “Come over here,” Lucas said, his voice friendly. He took the kid’s arm. “Look at the body.”

  “What?”

  “Come on. . . .” He waved the kid over, then said to the patrolman, “Loan me your flashlight, will you, pal?”

  Lucas took Dex around the bush, then duckwalked with him toward the woman on the wound side. He went willingly enough; hell, he’d seen six thousand bodies on TV, and once had walked by a place where some ambulance guys were taking a body out of a house. This’d be cool.

  A foot from the body, Lucas turned the light on the stomach wound.

  “Fuck,” said Dex. He stood up, straight through the bush, and started thrashing his way out.

  Lucas caught his web pocket, hauled him back down, rough. “Come on, man, you can tell people about this. How the cops let you check her out.” He put the flashlight on the girl’s face. “Look at her eyes, man, they’re still open, they look like eggs. You can smell her guts if you get closer, kind of soapy smelling.”