“Hey.” She’d stopped in the kitchen, was taking a Sprite out of the refrigerator. He kissed her on the cheek. “Do anything good?”
“I watched Harrison and MacRinney do a free flap on a kid with Bell’s palsy,” she said, popping the top on the can.
“Interesting?” She put her purse on the kitchen counter and turned her face up to him: her face was a little lopsided, as though she’d had a ring career before turning to medicine. He loved the face; he could remember reacting the first time he’d talked with her, in a horror of a burned-out murder scene in northern Wisconsin: she wasn’t very pretty, he’d thought, but she was very attractive. And a little while later, she’d cut his throat with a jackknife. . . .
Now she nodded. “Couldn’t see some of the critical stuff—mostly clearing away a lot of fat, which is pretty picky. They had a double operating microscope, so I could watch Harrison work part of the time. He put five square knots around the edge of an artery that wasn’t a heck of a lot bigger than a broom straw.”
“Could you do that?”
“Maybe,” she said, her voice serious. He’d learned about surgeons and their competitive instincts. He knew how to push her buttons. “Eventually, but . . . You’re pushing my buttons.”
“Maybe.”
She stopped, stood back and looked at him, picking something up from his voice. “Did something happen?”
He shrugged. “I had a fairly interesting case for about fifteen minutes this afternoon. It’s gone now, but . . . I don’t know.”
“Interesting?” She worried.
“Yeah, there’s a woman from the BCA who thinks we’ve got a serial killer around. She’s a little crazy, but she might be right.”
Now she was worried. She stepped back toward him. “I don’t want you to get hurt again, messing with some maniac.”
“It’s over, I think. We’re off the case.”
“Off?”
Lucas explained, including the strange call from Connell. Weather listened intently, finishing the Sprite. “You think she’s up to something,” she said when he finished.
“It sounded like it. I hope she doesn’t get burned. C’mon. Let’s run.”
“Can we go down to Grand and get ice cream afterwards?”
“We’ll have to do four miles.”
“God, you’re hard.”
AFTER DARK, AFTER the run and the ice cream, Weather began reviewing notes for the next morning’s operation. Lucas was amazed by how often she operated. His knowledge of surgery came from television, where every operation was a crisis, undertaken only with great study and some peril. With Weather, it was routine. She operated almost every day, and some days, two or three times. “You’ve got to do it a lot, if you’re going to do it at all,” she said. She’d be in bed by ten and up by five-thirty.
Lucas did business for a while, then prowled the house, finally went down to the basement for a small off-duty gun, clipped it under his waistband and pulled his golf shirt over it. “I’m going out for a while,” he said.
Weather looked up from the bed. “I thought the case was over.”
“Ehh. I’m looking for a guy.”
“So take it easy,” she said. She had a yellow pencil clenched between her teeth, and spoke around it; she looked cute, but he picked up the tiny spark of fear in her eyes.
He grinned and said, “No sweat. I’ll tell you straight out when there might be a problem.”
“Sure.”
Lucas’s house was on the east bank of the Mississippi, in a quiet neighborhood of tall dying elms and a few oaks, with the new maples and ginkgoes and ash trees replacing the disappearing elms. At night, the streets were alive with middle-class joggers working off the office flab, and couples strolling hand in hand along the dimly lit walkways. When Lucas stopped in the street to shift gears, he heard a woman laugh somewhere not too far away; he almost went back inside to Weather.
Instead, he headed to the Marshall-Lake Bridge, crossed the Mississippi, and a mile farther on was deep into the Lake Street strip. He cruised the cocktail lounges, porno stores, junk shops, rental-furniture places, check-cashing joints, and low-end fast-food franchises that ran through a brutally ugly landscape of cheap lighted signs. Children wandered around at all times of day and night, mixing with the suburban coke-seekers, dealers, drunks, raggedy-hip insurance salesmen, and a few lost souls from St. Paul, desperately seeking the shortcut home. A pair of cops pulled up alongside the Porsche at a stoplight and looked him over, thinking Dope dealer. He rolled down his window and the driver grinned and said something, and the passenger-side cop rolled down his window and said, “Davenport?”
“Yeah.”
“Great car, man.”
The driver called across his partner, “Hey, dude, you got a little rock? I could use a taste, mon.”
FRANKLIN AVENUE WAS as rugged as Lake Street, but darker. Lucas pulled a slip of paper from his pocket, turned on a reading light, checked the address he had for Junky Doog, and went looking for it. Half the buildings were missing their numbers. When he found the right place, there was a light in the window and a half-dozen people sitting on the porch outside.
Lucas parked, climbed out, and the talk on the porch stopped. He walked halfway up the broken front sidewalk and stopped. “There a guy named Junky Doog who lives here?”
A heavyset Indian woman heaved herself out of a lawn chair. “Not now. All my family live here now.”
“Do you know him?”
“No, I don’t, Mr. Police.” She was polite. “We’ve been here almost four months and never heard the name.”
Lucas nodded. “Okay.” He believed her.
Lucas started crawling bars, talking to bartenders and customers. He’d lost time on the street, and the players had changed. Here and there, somebody picked him out, said his name, held up a hand: the faces and names came back, but the information was sparse.
He started back home, saw the Blue Bull on a side street, and decided to make a last stop.
A half-dozen cars were parked at odd attitudes around the bar’s tiny parking lot, as though they’d been abandoned to avoid a bombing run. The Blue Bull’s windows were tinted, so that patrons could see who was coming in from the lot without being seen themselves. Lucas left the Porsche at a fire hydrant on the street, sniffed the night air—creosote and tar—and went inside.
The Blue Bull could sell cheap drinks, the owner said, because he avoided high overhead. He avoided it by never fixing anything. The pool table had grooves that would roll a ball though a thirty-degree arc into a corner pocket. The overhead fans hadn’t moved since the sixties. The jukebox had broken halfway through a Guy Lom bardo record, and hadn’t moved since.
Nor did the decor change: red-flocked whorehouse wallpaper with a patina of beer and tobacco smoke. The obese bartender, however, was new. Lucas dropped on a stool and the bartender wiped his way over. “Yeah?”
“Carl Stupella still work here?” Lucas asked.
The bartender coughed before answering, turning his head away, not bothering to cover his mouth. Spit flew down the bar. “Carl’s dead,” he said, recovering.
“Dead?”
“Yeah. Choked on a bratwurst at a Twins game.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
The bartender shrugged, started a smile, thought better of it, and shrugged again. Coughed. “His time was up,” he said piously, running his rag in a circle. “You a friend of his?”
“Jesus Christ, no. I’m looking for another guy. Carl knew him.”
“Carl was an asshole,” the bartender said philosophically. He leaned one elbow on the bar. “You a cop?”
“Yup.”
The bartender looked around. There were seven other people in the bar, five sitting alone, looking at nothing at all, the other two with their heads hunched together so they could whisper. “Who’re you looking for?”
“Randolph Leski? He used to hang out here.”
The bartender’s eye shifted down the
bar, then back to Lucas. He leaned forward, dropping his voice. “Does this shit bring in money?”
“Sometimes. You get on the list. . . .”
“Randy’s about eight stools down,” he muttered. “On the other side of the next two guys.”
Lucas nodded, and a moment later, leaned back a few inches and glanced to his right. Looking at the bartender again, he said quietly, “The guy I’m looking for is big as you.”
“You mean fat,” the bartender said.
“Hefty.”
The bartender tilted his head. “Randy had a tumor. They took out most of his gut. He can’t keep the weight on no more. They say he eats a pork chop, he shits sausages. They don’t digest.”
Lucas looked down the bar again, said, “Give me a draw, whatever.”
The bartender nodded, stepped away. Lucas took a business card out of his pocket, rolled out a twenty and the business card. “Thanks. What’s your name?”
“Earl. Stupella.”
“Carl’s . . .”
“Brother.”
“Maybe you hear something serious sometime, you call me,” Lucas said. “Keep the change.”
LUCAS PICKED UP the glass of beer and wandered down the bar. Stopped, did a double take. The thin man on the stool turned his head: loose skin hung around his face and neck like a basset hound’s, but Randy Leski’s mean little pig-eyes peered out of it.
“Randy,” Lucas said. “As I live and breathe.”
Leski shook his head once, as though annoyed by a fly in a kitchen. Leski ran repair scams, specializing in the elderly. Lucas had made him a hobby. “Go away. Please.”
“Jesus. Old friends,” Lucas said, spreading his arms. The other talk in the bar died. “You’re looking great, man. You been on a diet?”
“Kiss my ass, Davenport. Whatever you want, I don’t got it.”
“I’m looking for Junky Doog.”
Leski sat a little straighter. “Junky? He cut on somebody?”
“I just need to talk to him.”
Leski suddenly giggled. “Christ, old Junky.” He made a gesture as if wiping a tear away from his eyes. “I tell you, the last I heard of him, he was working out at a landfill in Dakota County.”
“Landfill?”
“Yeah. The dump. I don’t know which one, I just hear this from some guys. Christ, born in a junkyard, the guy gets sent to the nuthouse. When they kick him out of there, he winds up in a dump. Some people got all the luck, huh?” Leski started laughing, great phlegm-sucking wheezes.
Lucas looked at him for a while, waiting for the wheezing to subside, then nodded.
Leski said, “I hear you’re back.”
“Yeah.”
Leski took a sip of his beer, grimaced, looked down at it, and said, “I heard when you got shot last winter. First time I been in a Catholic church since we were kids.”
“A church?”
“I was praying my ass off that you’d fuckin’ croak,” Leski said. “After a lot of pain.”
“Thanks for thinking of me,” Lucas said. “You still run deals on old people?”
“Go hump yourself.”
“You’re a breath of fresh air, Randy . . . Hey.” Leski’s old sport coat had an odd crinkle, a lump. Lucas touched his side. “Are you carrying?”
“C’mon, leave me alone, Davenport.”
Randy Leski never carried: it was like an article of his religion. “What the hell happened?”
Leski was a felon. Carrying could put him inside. He looked down at his beer. “You seen my neighborhood?”
“Not lately.”
“Bad news. Bad news, Davenport. Glad my mother didn’t live to see it. These kids, Davenport, they’ll kill you for bumping into them,” Leski said, tilting his head sideways to look at Lucas. His eyes were the color of water. “I swear to God, I was in Pansy’s the other night, and this asshole kid starts giving some shit to this girl, and her boyfriend stands up—Bill McGuane’s boy—and says to her, ‘C’mon, let’s go.’ And they go. And I sees Bill, and I mention it, and he says, ‘I told that kid, don’t fight, ever. He’s no chickenshit, but it’s worth your life to fight.’ And he’s right, Davenport. You can’t walk down the street without worrying that somebody’s gonna knock you in the head. For nothin’. For not a fuckin’ thing. It used to be, if somebody was looking for you, they had a reason you could understand. Now? For nothing.”
“Well, take it easy with the piece, huh?”
“Yeah.” Leski turned back to the bar and Lucas stepped away and turned. Then Leski suddenly giggled, his flaps of facial flesh trembling with the effort, and said, “Junky Doog.” And giggled some more.
Outside, Lucas looked around, couldn’t think of anything else to do. Far away, he could hear sirens—lots of them. Something going on, but he didn’t know where. He thought about calling in, finding out where the action was; but that many sirens, it was probably a fire or an auto accident. He sighed, a little tired now, and headed back to the car.
WEATHER WAS ASLEEP. She’d be up at six, moving quietly not to wake him; by seven, she’d be in the OR; Lucas would sleep for three hours after that. Now, he undressed in the main bath down the hall from the bedroom, took a quick shower to get the bar smoke off his skin, and then slipped in beside her. He let himself roll against her, her leg smooth against his. Weather slept in an old-fashioned man’s T-shirt and bikini pants, which left something—not much—to the imagination.
He lay on his back and got a quick mental snapshot of her in the shirt and underpants, bouncing around the bedroom. Sometimes, when she wasn’t operating the next morning, he’d get the same snapshot, couldn’t escape it, and his hand would creep up under the T-shirt. . . .
Not tonight. Too late. He turned his head, kissed her goodnight. He should always do that, she’d told him: her subconscious would know.
WHAT SEEMED LIKE a long time later, Lucas felt her hand on him and opened his eyes. The room was dimly lit, daylight filtering around the curtains. Weather, sitting fully dressed on the bed beside him, gave him another tantalizing twitch. “It’s nice that men have handles,” she said. “It makes them easy to wake up.”
“Huh?” He was barely conscious.
“You better come out and look at the TV,” she said, letting go of him. “The Openers program is talking about you.”
“Me?” He struggled to sit up.
“What’s that quaint phrase you police officers use? ‘The fuckin’ shit has hit the fan?’ I think that’s it.”
7
ANDERSON WAS WAITING in the corridor outside Lucas’s office, reading through a handful of computer printouts. He pushed away from the wall when he saw Lucas.
“Chief wants to see us now.”
“I know, I got a call. I saw TV3,” Lucas said.
“Paper for you,” Anderson said, handing Lucas a manila file. “The overnights on Wannemaker. Nothing in the galleries. The Camel’s confirmed, the tobacco on her body matched the tobacco in the cigarette. There were ligature marks on her wrists, but no ties; her ankles were tied with a piece of yellow polypropylene rope. The rope was old, partially degraded by exposure to sunlight, so if we can find any more of it, they could probably make a match.”
“Anything else? Any skin, semen, anything?”
“Not so far . . . And here’s the Bey file.”
“Jesus.” Lucas took the file, flipped it open. Most of the paper inside had been Xeroxed for Connell’s report; a few minor things he hadn’t seen before. Mercedes Bey, thirty-seven, killed in 1984, file still open. The first of Connell’s list, the centerpiece of the TV3 story.
“Have you heard about the lakes?” Anderson asked, his voice pitching lower, as though he were about to tell a particularly dirty joke.
“What happened?” Lucas looked up from the Bey file.
“We’ve got a bad one over by the lakes. Too late to make morning TV. Guy and his girlfriend, maybe his girlfriend. Guy’s in a coma, could be a veggie. The woman’s dead. Her head was crushed,
probably by a pipe or a steel bar. Or a rifle barrel or a long-barreled pistol, maybe a Redhawk. Small-time robbery, looks like. Really ugly. Really ugly.”
“They’re freaking out in homicide?”
“Everybody’s freaking out,” Anderson said. “Everybody went over there. Roux just got back. And then this TV3 thing—the chief is hot. Really hot.”
ROUX WAS FURIOUS. She jabbed her cigarette at Lucas. “Tell me you didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Lucas shrugged, looked at the others, and sat down. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Roux nodded, took a long drag on her cigarette; her office smelled like a bowling alley on league night. Lester sat in a corner with his legs crossed, unhappy. Anderson perched on a chair, peering owlishly at Roux through his thick-lensed glasses. “I didn’t think so,” Roux said. “But we all know who did.”
“Mmm.” Lucas didn’t want to say it.
“Don’t want to say it?” Roux asked. “I’ll say it. That fuckin’ Connell.”
“Twelve minutes,” Anderson said. “Longest story TV3’s ever run. They must have had Connell’s file. They had every name and date nailed down. They dug up some file video on the Mercedes Bey killing. They used stuff they’d have never used back then, when they made it. And the stuff on Wannemaker, Jesus Christ, they had video of the body being hoisted out of the Dumpster, no bag, no nothing, just this big fuckin’ lump of guts with a face hanging off it.”
“Shot it from the bridge,” Lucas said. “We saw them up there. I didn’t know the lenses were that good, though.”
“Bey’s still an open file, of course,” Lester said, re-crossing his legs from one side to the other. “No statute of limitations on murder.”
“Should have thought of that yesterday,” Roux said, getting up to pace the carpet, flicking ashes with every other step. Her hair, never particularly chic, was standing up in spots, like small horns. “They had Bey’s mother on. She’s this fragile old lady in a nursing-home housecoat, a face like parchment. She said we abandoned her daughter to her killers. She looked like shit, she looked like she was dying. They must’ve dumped her out of bed at three in the morning to get the tape.”