“Can you show us the place?” Sloan asked.
“Sure. And Gloria’s name is on the mailbox. She checked her mailbox when we were going up the stairs and I saw that it said Gloria something.”
DINKYTOWN IS AN island of well-worn commerce off the campus at the University of Minnesota, two-and three-story buildings selling clothes and fast food and compact discs and pharmaceuticals and Xerox copies. They were backing into a parking space when McPherson pointed across the street and said, “There she is. That’s Gloria. And that’s her building.”
Gloria was a thin, hunch-shouldered woman, dressed, like McPherson, in head-to-toe black; like McPherson, she wore an amulet. But while McPherson had that perfect, open face and peaches-and-cream complexion, Gloria was dark, saturnine, her face closed and wary like a fox’s.
“Wait here, or go get a sandwich or something,” Lucas said to McPherson. “We might have some more questions for you.”
He and Sloan scrambled through the traffic and hurried through the apartment house door. Gloria was just locking her mailbox and held a green electric-bill envelope in her teeth.
“Gloria?” Lucas was out front.
She took the envelope out and looked at them. “Yes?”
“We’re police officers, we’d…
“Like your help,” Sloan finished.
GLORIA CROSBY MIGHT have been pretty, but she wasn’t: she was unkempt, a little dirty, her face was formed in a frown. She reluctantly took them to her apartment on the top floor. “Been working on a thesis, haven’t had much time to clean,” she said. When she opened her door, the apartment smelled of tomato soup and feathers, with an overlay of tobacco and marijuana.
“Do a little grass from time to time?” Sloan asked cheerfully.
“I don’t, no,” she said. She seemed almost slow. “Marijuana makes you more stupid than you already are. Some people choose that, and I say, ‘Okay.’ But I don’t choose it.”
“Smells sort of grassy up here,” Sloan said.
“A couple of people were visiting last night, and they smoked,” she said offhandedly. “I didn’t.”
“You don’t think that’s wrong?” Lucas asked.
“No, do you?”
Lucas shrugged and Sloan laughed. Sloan said, “About two months ago, you played D&D up here with a group of five people. The dungeon master was this man. We need his name.” He handed her a copy of the composite.
Crosby took the flier, looked at it for a long time. Then her forehead wrinkled and she said, “Well—this isn’t the guy, but I know who you’re talking about. He looks sort of like this, but the eyes are wrong. His name is…David.” She dropped her hand to her side and went to a window and looked down at the street and pulled on her lower lip.
Lucas said, “What…”
She put up a hand to silence him, continued to look down at the street. After a moment, “David…Ellers. E-L-L-E-R-S. God, I almost forgot. Tells you about my relationships, huh?”
“Do you know…”
“How’d you know about the game?” she asked, turning to look at them. She was interested, but totally unflustered: so unflustered that Lucas wondered if she was on medication.
“I’m in the gaming net, besides being a cop,” Lucas said.
She pointed a finger at him and said, with the first flicker of animation, “Davenport.”
“Yeah.”
“You did some wicked games, before you went to computers,” she said. “Your computer games suck.”
“Thanks,” Lucas said, dryly. “Do you know where this guy lives?”
“He’s the guy who took the Manette chick?”
“Well, we’re looking into that…”
“I think you’re barking up the wrong tree,” she said. “David was from Connecticut and he was on his way to California.”
“I got the impression that you knew him pretty well,” Lucas said.
She sighed, dropped into a chair. “Well, he stayed here for a week and fucked me every day, but he was just here that one week.”
“What kind of a car did he have?” Lucas asked.
She snorted and showed what might have been either a smile or a grimace. “A traveling gamer, on his way to California? What do you think?”
Lucas thought a minute, and then said, “A Harley.”
“Absolutely,” Gloria said. “A Harley-Davidson sportster. He tried to scam me: he said he’d love to take me with him, but he needed the money to trade up to a soft-tail. I told him to pick me up when he got it.”
She had few details about David Ellers: she’d met him at a McDonald’s, where he was arguing with some people about the MYST game. He didn’t have a place to stay, and he looked nice, so she asked if he wanted to stay over. He did, for a week.
“I hated to see him go,” she said. “He was intense.”
He was from Connecticut, she said. “I think his parents had money, like insurance or something. He was from Hartford, maybe.”
“WHAT DO YOU think?” Lucas asked Sloan when they were back on the street. McPherson was walking back toward them, eating a cheeseburger, carrying a McDonald’s bag.
“I don’t know,” Sloan said. “If she was lying, she was good at it. But it didn’t sound like the truth, either. Goddamn dopers, it’s hard to tell. They don’t have that edge of fear.”
They got to the car just as McPherson did; she offered some fries to Lucas and Sloan, and seemed slightly chagrined when Sloan took some. “What happened?” she asked.
“She said he was passing through,” Lucas said, briefly. “She said his name is David Ellers, he’s from Connecticut, and he was on his way to the West Coast.”
McPherson had taken a large bite out of the cheeseburger, but she stopped chewing for a moment, then looked sideways out the car window, shook her head at Lucas, finished chewing, swallowed, licked her lips, and said, “God: when you said that, Connecticut, it popped into my head. I asked this guy if he knew my friend David, because they both came from the same town. Wayzata. But he said he went to a private school and didn’t know him.”
“Wayzata?” Sloan asked.
“I’m pretty sure,” she said.
“Gloria said his name was David,” Lucas said.
McPherson shook her head. “It wasn’t. I would have remembered that—I mean, two Davids from the same town and the same age and all.”
Sloan sighed and looked at Lucas. “God, it’s a shame the way young people lie to us nowadays.”
“And the old people,” Lucas said. “And the middle-aged.” To McPherson he said, “C’mon. Let’s go see if she remembers you, and if that helps her remember the guy’s name.”
“Jeez, I kinda hate to be seen with cops,” McPherson said.
“Is that what they taught you in Wisconsin?” Sloan asked as they got back out of the car.
“Nope. They taught me that if I get lost, ask a cop. So I got over here at the U, and I got lost, and I asked a cop. He wanted to take me home. With him, I mean.”
“Must’ve been a St. Paul cop,” Lucas said. “C’mon, let’s go.”
THEY CLIMBED THE stairs again, but when they knocked on Gloria’s door, there was no answer. “Could be visiting another apartment,” Sloan said. But it didn’t feel that way. The building was silent, nothing moving.
Lucas walked down to the end of the hall and looked out a window: “Fire escape,” he said. An old iron drop-ladder fire escape hung on the side of the building. He checked the window above it, and the window slid open easily. “The window’s unlocked from inside. Goes down the back.”
He leaned out: nothing moved.
Sloan said, “She’s running.”
Lucas said, “And she knows him—you go that way.”
Sloan ran for the stairs, while Lucas went out the window and ran down the fire escape. At the top of the lowest flight, he had to wait for a counter-weight to drop the stairs to a narrow walkway between the apartment and the next building. The walkway was filled with debris, blown pape
r, a few boards, a bent and rusting real-estate sign, and wine bottles. Lucas looked one way toward the street, and the other toward an alley that ran along the back of the buildings. If she’d gone out to the street, they should have seen her. He ran the other way, toward the alley, high-stepping over dried dog shit and a knee-high pile of what looked like cat litter. Just down the alley was the rear door of a pizza shop, with a window. Behind the window, a kid was hosing down dishes in a stainless-steel sink. Lucas went to the door and pushed through: and a woman leaned against a counter, smoking a cigarette, and the kid looked up. “Hey,” she said, straightening up. “You’re not supposed to…”
“I’m a cop,” Lucas said. “Did either of you guys see a woman come down the fire escape in back of the building across the alley? Five, six minutes ago?”
The woman and the dishwasher looked at each other and then the dishwasher said, “I guess. Skinny, dressed in black?”
“That’s her,” Lucas said. “Did you see where she went?”
“She walked up that way…” The dishwasher pointed.
“Was she in a hurry?”
“Yeah. She sort of skipped, and she was carrying like a laundry bag. She went around the corner. What’d she do?”
Lucas left without answering, ran down to the corner. There was a bus stop, with nobody waiting. He ran across a street, into a bakery, flashed his badge and asked to use a phone: a flour-dusted fat man led him into the back and pointed at a wall phone. Lucas called Dispatch: “She might be on a bus, or she might be walking someplace. But flood it: we’re looking for a tall, pale woman in her middle twenties, dressed all in black, probably in a hurry, probably carrying a bag of some kind. Maybe a sack. Check for a car registration and get that out.”
Back on the street, he looked both ways: he could see three or four women dressed in black. One might have been Crosby, but when she turned to cross a street, Lucas, running up from behind, saw it wasn’t her. A cop flashed by: two guys looking out the windows. Lucas turned back: there were students everywhere.
Too many of them in black.
LUCAS WALKED BACK to the apartment’s front door. Sloan turned the corner and walked toward him from the other end of the street. Sloan shook his head, took off his hat, smoothed his hair, and said, “Didn’t see a thing.”
“Goddamnit, this is just like the fuckin’ game store. We were this close,” Lucas said, showing an inch between his thumb and forefinger. He looked up at the building. “Let’s see if there’s a manager.”
A glassed-over building directory showed a manager in 3A; his wife sent them down to the basement, where they found him building a box kite.
Lucas explained the problem, and asked, “Have you got a key?”
“Sure.” The manager had a thick German accent. He gave the box kite a final tweak, tightened a balsa-wood joint with a c-clamp, and said, “Gum dis vay.” He didn’t mention a warrant.
MCPHERSON WAS WAITING in the hall outside Gloria’s room. “Could you take a cab?” Lucas asked.
“Well…”
“Here’s twenty bucks; that’s to cover the cab and buy you dinner,” he said, handing her the bill. “And thanks. If you think of anything…”
“I’ve got your number,” she nodded.
The manager let them into Gloria’s apartment. They did a quick walk-through: something was bothering Lucas—he’d seen something, but he didn’t know what. Something his eye had picked up. But when? During the talk with Crosby? No. It was just now…he looked around, couldn’t think of it. Getting old, he thought.
“Do you know any of her friends?” Lucas asked the manager, with little hope.
The German went through an elaborate, Frenchlike shrug, and said, “Not me.”
THEY KNOCKED ON every door in the building, with the manager trailing behind them. Few people were in their apartments, and nobody had seen her. Two patrol cops showed up and Lucas said, “Go with the manager. He has legal access, so you don’t need a search warrant. Check every single apartment. Don’t mess with anything, just check for the girl.” As they were walking away, he called, “Look under the beds,” and one of the cops said, with an edge, “Right, chief.”
Lucas, scowling, turned and said to Sloan, “Find the best picture you can, get it back to the office, and get it out. Tell Rose Marie to hand it out to the press.”
“What’re you doing?” Sloan asked.
Lucas looked around. “I’m gonna tear the place to pieces, see what I can see. Oh. Get somebody to check the phone company, see if she just made a call.”
“All right. And maybe I ought to get a search warrant.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Sloan started looking, while Lucas did another walk-through. The apartment had only three rooms—a living room with a kitchenette at one end, a tiny bath, and a small bedroom.
A battered bureau, probably from the Salvation Army store, was pushed against one wall of the bedroom. Several drawers stood open. He’d glanced in the bedroom during the original interview, and he didn’t remember the drawers being open: so she’d taken some clothes. He lifted her mattress, looked under it. Nothing. He tossed the bureau drawers onto the mattress. Nothing. Rolled her shoes out of a closet, patted down her clothes. Nothing.
He walked back out to the kitchenette, looked in the refrigerator, pulled out the ice trays. He checked every scrap of paper within reach of the telephone. In ten minutes he had a dozen phone numbers, mostly scrawled on the backs of junk-mail envelopes, a few more on a phone book. He checked the exchanges: none was in Eagan, or Apple Valley, or down that way. He stacked the phone book on the counter with the envelopes, mentioned them to Sloan.
He went to the bathroom next and peered into the medicine cabinet. There were a dozen brown pill bottles on the top shelf, lined up like chessmen. “She’s got some weird meds,” Lucas called to Sloan. “Let’s find out where she gets them and what they’re for. Get somebody to check the local pharmacies and maybe the U clinic. This looks like serious shit, so she might need some more.”
“Okay,” Sloan called back. Lucas opened the door to a small linen closet—women hid things in linen closets, refrigerators, and bureau drawers. He found nothing useful.
Sloan stuck his head in. “She didn’t like cameras,” he said. He showed Lucas a handful of Polaroids and a couple of prints. She was always in black, almost always alone, standing against something. The few other people in the prints were women.
“So get them all out,” Lucas said briefly. He slammed a drawer shut, and they heard glass breaking inside.
“All right,” Sloan said. Then: “Chill out, man. We’ll get her, sooner or later. You’re freaking out.”
“She knows him, goddamnit,” Lucas said. He turned and kicked the bathroom wall, the toe of his shoe breaking through the drywall. They both stood and looked at the hole for a second. Then Lucas said, “She knows who the motherfucker is, and where the motherfucker is, and we let her go.”
17
ANDERSON TRACKED GLORIA Crosby through the state records, starting with a driver’s license to get her exact age, then into the national crime computers—she’d been twice convicted of shoplifting from Walgreen’s drug stores—and through the court records into the mental health system. Crosby had been in and out of treatment programs and hospitals since she was a young teenager; her home address was listed as North Oaks, a suburban bedroom north of St. Paul.
“We oughta get some people up there,” Anderson said, leaning in the office door.
“I’m not doing anything except reading the book,” Lucas said, taking his feet out of his desk drawer. “Is Sloan still wandering around?”
“He was drinking coffee down in Homicide.”
THEY TOOK LUCAS’S Porsche, Sloan driving it hard. Lucas said, “I hope Gloria doesn’t set our guy off. If he gets the feeling that people know…”
Sloan, grunting as he shifted up and hammered the Porsche through the North Oaks entry, said, “If I was Gloria, I’d be very fu
cking careful. Very careful.” The address came up, a small redwood rambler that looked out of place among the larger homes. The house was set into a low rise, with a split-rail fence defining the yard. Sloan asked, “Put it right in the driveway?”
“Yeah. I’ll take the back.”
“Sure.”
Sloan squealed into the driveway, hit the brakes, and they were out, Lucas heading around the side of the house. The grass on the open parts of the yard had been thoroughly burned off, though the summer hadn’t been especially hot or dry. In the shadier spots, it was long and ragged, untended.
Sloan walked up to the front door, passed a picture window with drawn curtains, stopped, peered through a crack in the curtains, saw nobody, and rang the doorbell.
MARILYN CROSBY WAS a slight, gray-haired woman, stooped, suspicious, her face lined with worry. She stood in the doorway, one hand clutching her housecoat at the throat. “I haven’t seen her or heard from her since last spring, some time. She wanted money. I gave her seventy-five dollars; but we’re not close any more.”
“We need to talk,” Sloan said, low-keyed, relaxing. “She may be involved with the man who did the Manette kidnapping. We need to know as much about her as we can—who her friends are.”
“Well…” She was reluctant, but finally pushed the door open and stepped back. Sloan followed her in.
“She’s not here, is she?” Sloan asked.
“No. Of course not.” Crosby frowned. “I wouldn’t lie to the police.”
Sloan looked at her, nodded. “All right. Where’s your back door?”
“Through there, through the kitchen…What?”
Sloan walked through the kitchen with its odor of old coffee grounds and rancid potatoes and pushed open the back door.
“Lucas…yeah, c’mon.”
“You had me surrounded?” Crosby seemed offended.
“We really need to find your daughter,” Sloan said. Lucas came inside, and Sloan said, “So let’s talk. Is your husband home?”