Lucas Davenport Novels 6-10

  Lucas looked at the passage. Moreover the Nethinims dwelt in Ophel unto the place over against the water gate toward the east, and the tower that lieth out.

  “Huh.” He passed the paper to Sloan and walked down the office to a wall map of the Metro area, traced the Mississippi with his finger. “One thing you can see from the river is all those green water towers,” he said. “They’re like mushrooms along the tops of all the tallest hills. The water gate could be any of the dams.”

  “Want me to check?”

  Lucas grinned. “Take you two days. Just call all the towns along here.” He snapped his finger at the map. “Hastings, Cottage Grove, St. Paul Park, Newport, Inver Grove, South St. Paul, like that. Tell them you’re working Manette and ask them to swing a patrol car by the water towers; see if there’s anything to see.”

  BLACK SHOWED UP ten minutes later, morose, handed Lucas a file and a tape. “Guy’s messing with kids. Somebody ought to cut his fuckin’ nuts off.”

  “Pretty explicit?”

  “It’s all there, and I don’t give a shit what the shrinks say. This guy likes doing it. And he likes talking about it—he likes the attention he’s getting from Manette. He’ll never stop.”

  “Yeah, he will,” Lucas said, flipping through the file. “For several years…I’ll take it to the chief. We want to hold off until Manette’s out of the way.”

  Black nodded. “We got some doozies in the files.” He sat down opposite Lucas, spread five files on the desk like a poker hand, pushed one toward Lucas. “Look at this guy. I think he may have raped a half-dozen women, but he talks them out of doing anything about it. He brags about it: breaks down for them, weeps. Then he laughs about it. He says he’s addicted to sex, and he’s coming on to Manette…right here, see, she mentions it, and how she might have to redirect his therapy.”

  THEY WERE READING files an hour later when Greave hurried in. “They’ve got something in Cottage Grove.”

  Lucas stood up. “What is it?”

  “They said it’s like an oil drum under one of the water towers.”

  “How do they know?”

  “It’s got your name spray-painted on it,” Greave said.

  “My name?”

  Greave shrugged. “That’s what they said—and they are freaked out. They want your ass down there.”

  ON THE WAY down to Cottage Grove, the cellular buzzed and Lucas flipped it open. “Yeah?”

  Mail cooed, “Hey, Davenport, got it figured out?”

  Lucas knew the voice before the third word was out. “Listen, I…”

  But he was gone.

  9

  SIX BLOCKS FROM the water tower, Lucas ran into a police blockade, two squad cars V-ed across the street. The civilian traffic was turning around, jamming up the street. He put the Porsche on the yellow line and accelerated past the frustrated drivers, until two cops ran toward him waving him off.

  A red-faced patrolman, one hand on his pistol, leaned up to the window. “Hey, what the hell…”

  Lucas held up his ID and said, “Davenport, Minneapolis PD. Get me through.”

  The cop ran back to one of the squads, yelled something through an open window, and the cop inside backed it up. Lucas accelerated through the gap and up toward the water tower. Along the way, he saw cops in the streets, two different sets of uniforms. They were evacuating houses along the way, and women with kids in station wagons hurried down the streets away from the tower.

  A bomb? Chemicals? What?

  The water tower looked like an aqua-green alien from War of the Worlds, its big egg-shaped body supported by fat, squat legs. Three fire trucks, a cluster of squad cars, a bomb squad truck, two ambulances, and a wrecker were parked a hundred yards away. Lucas pulled into the cluster.

  “Davenport?” A stout, red-faced man in a too-tight cop’s uniform waved him over. “Don Carpenter, Cottage Grove.” He wiped his face on his sleeve. He was sweating heavily, though the day was cool. “We might have a big problem.”

  “Bomb?”

  Carpenter looked toward the top of the hill. “We don’t know. But it’s an oil barrel, and it’s full of something heavy. We haven’t tried to move it, but it’s substantial.”

  “Somebody said my name is on it.”

  “That’s right: Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police. Standard bullshit graffiti-artist spray paint. We were gonna open it, but then someone said, ‘Jesus, if this guy’s fuckin’ with Davenport, what’s to keep him from putting a few pounds of dynamite or some shit in there? Or a gas bomb or something?’ So we’re standing back.”

  “Huh.” Lucas looked up toward the tower. Two men were there, talking. “Who are those guys?”

  “Bomb squad. We were all over the place before somebody thought it might be a bomb, so we don’t think it’s dangerous to get near. A time bomb doesn’t make sense, because he didn’t know when we’d find it.”

  “Let’s take a look,” Lucas said.

  The bottom of the tower was enclosed by a hurricane fence, with a truck-sized gate on one end. “Cut the chain on the gate and drove right in,” Carpenter said. They were at the crest of the hill, and below them a steady stream of cars was leaving the neighborhood.

  “But nobody saw it.”

  “We don’t know—we were talking about a door-to-door, but then the bomb idea came up, and we never got to it.”

  “Maybe later,” Lucas said.

  The two bomb squad cops walked over and Lucas recognized one of them. He said, “How are you? You were on that case out in Lake Elmo.” The guy said, “Yeah, Bill Path, and this is Jesus Martinez.” He threw a thumb at his partner, and Lucas said, “What’ve we got?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Path said, looking back at the tower. Lucas could see the black oil drum through the hurricane fence. It sat directly under the bulb of the four-legged water tower. “But we don’t want to try to move it. We’re gonna pull the lid from a distance and see what happens.”

  “We’ve drained the tower,” Carpenter said. He wiped his sweating face on his sleeve again. “Just in case.”

  “Can I?” Lucas said, nodding at the oil barrel.

  “Sure,” said Path. “Just don’t kick it.”

  The barrel sat in the shade of the tower, and Lucas walked over to look at it, and then around it: a standard oil barrel, with a little rust, and a lid that looked professionally tight.

  “One of the first guys knocked on it, and nothing happened; so we knocked on it when we got here,” Martinez said, grinning at Lucas. He stepped up to the barrel and knocked on it. “It’s full of something.”

  “Could be water,” said Path. “If it’s full, and it’s water, it’d weigh about four-fifty.”

  “How’d he move it?” Lucas asked. “He couldn’t use a fork lift.”

  “I think he rolled it,” Path said. “Look…”

  He walked away from the barrel, peered around, then pointed. There was a deep edge-cut in the soft earth, then a series of interlocking rings along with a wavy line. “I think he rolled it to here, then tipped it up, then rim-rolled it to the middle.”

  Lucas nodded: he could see the pattern in the dirt.

  “Hey, look at this, Bill,” Martinez said to Path. He pointed at a lower corner of the barrel. “Is that just condensation, or is there a pinhole?”

  A drop of liquid seemed to be squeezing out of the barrel. Path got to his knees, peered at it, then grunted, “Looks like a pinhole.” He picked up a dandelion leaf, caught the drop on the leaf, smelled it, and passed it to Martinez.

  “What?” Lucas asked.

  Martinez said, “Nothing—probably water.”

  “So let’s jerk the lid.”

  Path fixed a block to an access ladder on the water tower, while Martinez fitted a harness around the lid. Then he tied a rock climber’s rope to the harness, ran it up through the block and down to the tow truck. The truck let out all of its cable, and when they finished, they were a hundred and fifty yards from the barrel.

  ??
?You ready for a big noise?” Path asked Carpenter.

  The chief said, “Don’t talk like that. Do you mean that? Do you think?”

  They all squatted behind cars, the wrecker rolled forward, and the lid flipped off like a beer cap. Nothing happened. Lucas could hear a plane droning down the river.

  “Well, shit,” Martinez said after a moment. He stood up. “Let’s go look.”

  They walked slowly back to the barrel. From thirty feet away, Lucas could see that it was filled with water. When they got next to it, they looked carefully inside. A small body was at the bottom of the barrel, a pale oval face turned to look up at them. The water was cloudy with a sediment of some kind, and the body shimmered, out of focus, a white dress floating around it like gauze, black hair drifting around the head.

  Martinez looked in the barrel and said, “No. I don’t do this.” And he walked away.

  “Oh, shit. Who is it?” Carpenter asked, peering open-mouthed into the barrel.

  The body was small. “Probably Genevieve Dunn,” Lucas said. “Are we sure this is water?”

  Path, looking in, put his face close to the surface and said, “Yeah. It’s water. He could have a big chunk of white phosphorus in there, waiting for us to get rid of the water.”

  Lucas shook his head: “Nah. This is what he wanted me to see. A jack-in-the-box. The motherfucker is playing games…Is that the Medical Examiner down there?”

  Carpenter nodded. “Yeah. I’ll get him.”

  Lucas stepped away and looked down the hill, waiting. There should be something else—or Mail would call again, to gloat. Carpenter, standing beside him, said, “I’d pull the trigger on this guy. How can you kill a kid?”

  Lucas said, “Yeah?” He remembered the line from a Vietnam vet, a street guy. How can you kill a kid? Just lead them a little less…

  The Medical Examiner was a young man with a thin face, thin spectacles, and a large Adam’s apple. He walked up, glanced in the barrel, and said, “What’s the shit in the water?”

  Nobody knew.

  “Well, give me something I can fish around with, huh?” He was unself-consciously cheerful, even for a Medical Examiner. “Give me one of those fire axes. I don’t want to put my hand in there if we don’t know what it is.”

  “Take it easy with the ax,” Carpenter said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the examiner said. He looked in the barrel again. “That’s not a kid.”

  “What?” Lucas walked back.

  “Not unless she had deformed hands and too big a head,” he said confidently.

  Lucas looked in the water again—it still looked like a child’s body. “I think it’s some kind of big plastic doll,” the examiner said. A fireman came up with a long curved tool that looked like an oversized poker. “Here.”

  The Medical Examiner took it, grabbed the body, but it slipped away. “Anchored with something,” he grunted. “Look, if this is just water, why don’t we dump it?”

  They did; the water spilled out on the grass, and the ME reached inside and pulled out a four-foot doll, plastic flesh, black hair, and paint-flaking baby blue eyes. Its feet were folded beneath it and tied to a brick to keep the doll from floating.

  “Got the big sense of humor, huh?” said the examiner. A white plastic tag floated from the doll’s neck. The examiner turned it. It said, in black grease pencil, “CLUE.”

  “I don’t think he has a sense of humor,” Lucas said. “I really don’t think he does.”

  “Then what is this shit?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said.

  LUCAS CALLED IN, then headed back toward Minneapolis. As he passed the refinery off Highway 61, Mail called again.

  “Goddamn, you were fast, Lucas. Can I call you Lucas? How’d you like all those fire trucks? I drove by while you guys were up there. What were you doing? Somebody said they thought it was a bomb or something. Is that right? Did you have the bomb squad up there?”

  “Listen, we think you might have some trouble, you know, making the world work right. And we think you might know it. We can get you help…”

  “You mean I’m fuckin’ nuts? Is that what you mean?”

  “Listen, I personally had a bad episode of depression a few years back, and I know what it’s like. The shit in your head is wrong, and it’s not your fault…”

  “Fuck that, Davenport, there’s nothing wrong with my fuckin’ head. There’s something wrong with the fuckin’ world. Turn on your TV sometime, asshole. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  And he was gone again.

  THE PHONE COMPANY was automatically tracing all calls to Lucas’s cellular phone and alerting the Dispatch Department at the same time. Dispatch would start cars toward the phone. But when Lester called, two minutes after Mail hung up, he said, “He was too quick. He was on the strip near the airport. We had cars there in two minutes forty-five seconds after he rang you, but he was gone. We stopped seven vans, nothing going there.”

  “Damnit. He won’t talk for more than ten seconds or so.”

  “He knows what he’s doing.”

  “All right. I’m heading back.”

  “Sherrill came up with another problem case, a guy fooling around with children—he’s been screwing ten-year-old girls at a playground. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but if we get Manette back, she might wind up doing some time.”

  Lucas shook his head and looked at the phone, then said, “Frank, we’re not secure here. This phone is a fuckin’ radio.”

  LESTER WAS WAITING when Lucas got back.

  “This Manette thing, the sex things,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “An awful lot of people know. They know down in Sex, and they’re pissed that they can’t move. It’s gonna get out, and it won’t be long.”

  “Are we running the names of all these guys?”

  “All of them.”

  “How about people they’ve abused? Could somebody be trying to get revenge on Manette?”

  Lester shrugged. “So we plug in all the victims. We got more goddamned names, and nothing coming up. What do you make of that thing out at the water tower?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “He says it’s a clue, but what kind of a clue? Why was it full of water? Watery grave? Was it the barrel?”

  Anderson came through, handed each of them a fat plastic binder with perhaps three hundred pages inside. “Everything we’ve got, except what might come out of the lab on the doll. And we’re not getting anything from the feebs.”

  “Big surprise.” Lucas flipped through the text.

  “Any ideas?” Lester asked.

  “Watery grave,” Lucas said. “That’s about it.”

  NOTHING MOVED. NOBODY called.

  Lucas finally phoned Anderson: “There’s an interview in your book with one of Manette’s neighbors.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She said there was somebody hanging around in a boat, in a spot where there aren’t any fish. Maybe we ought to run boat licenses against the other lists.”

  “Jesus, Lucas, we got hundreds of names already.”

  Later, Lucas called St. Anne’s College and asked for the psychology department. “Sister Mary Joseph, please.”

  “Is this Lucas?” The voice on the other end was breathless.

  “Yes.”

  “We were wondering if you’d call,” the receptionist said. “I’ll go get her.”

  Elle Kruger—Sister Mary Joseph—picked up the phone a moment later, her voice dry: “Well, they’re all in a tizzy around here. Sister Marple goes off to solve another one. And this one’s a gamer, I hear.”

  “Yeah. And it’s ugly,” Lucas said. “I think one of the kids is dead.”

  “Oh, no.” The wry quality disappeared from her voice. “How sure?”

  “The guy who took them left a clue: a doll in an oil barrel filled with water. I think the doll was supposed to represent one of the kids.”

  “I see. Do you want to come over and talk
?”

  “Weather should be home around six. If you’d like to walk over, I’ll cook some steaks.”

  “Six-thirty,” she said. “See you then.”

  ON HIS WAY home, Lucas took University Avenue toward St. Paul and stopped just short of the St. Paul city line. Davenport Simulations occupied a suite of offices on the first floor of a faceless but well-kept office building. Most of the offices in the building were closed. Davenport Simulations was completely lit up: most of the programmers started work in the early afternoon, and ran until midnight, or later.

  Lucas smiled at the receptionist as he went by; she smiled and waved and kept talking on her phone. Barry Hunt was in his office with one of the techies, poring over a printout. When Lucas knocked, he gave a friendly, “Hey, come on in,” while his face struggled to find an appropriate expression.

  Hunt had been finishing his MBA at St. Thomas when Lucas started looking for somebody to take over the company. For ten years, Lucas had run it out of his study, writing war and role-playing games, selling the games to three different companies. Almost against his will, he got involved in the shift to computer gaming. At the same time, he’d been forced out of the department; he wound up working full-time, writing emergency scenarios for what became a line of police-training software. The software sold, and everything began to move too quickly: he didn’t know about payroll, taxes, social security, royalties, worker’s comp, operator training.

  Elle had met Hunt in one of her psych classes and recommended him. Hunt took over the company operations and had done well, for both of them. But Hunt and Lucas were not especially compatible, and Lucas was no longer certain that Hunt was happy to see him drop by.

  “Barry, I need to talk to the software guys for a minute,” Lucas said. “I’ve got a problem. It’s this Manette thing.”

  Hunt shrugged. “Sure. Go ahead. I think everybody’s here.”

  “I swear, just a minute.”

  “Great…”

  The back two-thirds of the office suite was a single bay, cut up into small cubicles by shoulder-high dividers, exactly the kind used in the Homicide office. Seven men and two women, all young, were at work: six at individual monitors, three clustered around a large screen, running a search-trainer simulation. Another man and a heavy-set young woman, both with Coke-bottle glasses, were drinking coffee by a window. When Lucas walked in with Hunt, the room went quiet.