Rules of Prey (7 page)

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I have a vocation.”

Years later, and two days after Lucas had killed his first man as a police officer, she called him. She was a shrink of sorts, she said. Could she help? No, not really, but he would like to see her. He took her to the ice-cream shop. Professor of psychology, she said. Fascinating. Watching minds work.

Did she have a vocation? Lucas wondered. Or was it her face, the cross that she bore? He couldn’t ask, but when they left the shop she took his arm and smiled and said, “I have a vocation, Lucas.”

A year later, he sold his first game and it was a hit. The
Star-Tribune
did a feature story about it and she called him
again. She was a game player, she said. There was a games group at the college that regularly got together . . .

After that, he saw her virtually every week. Elle and another nun, a grocer and a bookie, both from St. Paul, a defense attorney from Minneapolis, and a student or two from St. Anne’s or the University of Minnesota made up a regular war-gaming group. They met in the gym, played-in an old unused room off what had been a girls’ locker room. They furnished the room with a half-dozen chairs, a Ping-Pong table for the gaming maps, a used overhead light donated by a pool parlor, and a bad stereo that Lucas got on the street.

They met on Thursdays. They were currently working through Lucas’ grandest creation, a replay of the Battle of Gettysburg that he would never be able to sell commercially. It was simply too complex. He’d had to program a portable computer to figure results.

Elle was General Lee.

Lucas parked the Porsche just down the hill from Albertus Magnus Hall and walked through the falling leaves up the hill toward the entrance. As he reached the bottom of the steps, she came out. The face was the same; so were the eyes, grave and gray, but always with a spark of humor.

“He can’t stop,” she told him as they strolled down the sidewalk. “The maddog falls into a category that cop shrinks call the sadistic killer. He’s doing it for the pleasure of it. He’s not hearing commands from God, he’s not being ordered by voices. He’s driven, all right, but he’s not insane in the sense that he’s out of control. He is very much in control, in the conventional sense of the word. He is aware of what he’s doing and what the penalties are. He makes plans and provides for contingencies. He may be quite intelligent.”

“How does he pick his victims?”

She shrugged. “Could be a completely adventitious encounter. Maybe he uses the phone book. But most likely he sees them personally, and whether he realizes it or not, he’s probably picking a type. There may well have been an encounter of some kind when he was young, with his mother,
with a female friend of his mother’s . . . somebody whose sexual identity has become fixed in his mind.”

“These women are small and dark—dark hair, dark eyes. One is a Mexican-American . . .”

“Exactly. So when he encounters one of these types, she somehow becomes fixed in his mind. Why it’s that particular one, when there are so many possibilities, I just don’t know. In any case, after he’s chosen her, he can’t escape her. His fantasies are built around her. He becomes obsessive. Eventually . . . he goes after her. Acts out the fantasies.”

At the ice-cream parlor, she ordered her usual, a hot-fudge with a maraschino cherry. A few of the customers glanced curiously at them, the nun in her black habit, the tall, well-dressed male who was so obviously her friend. They ignored the passing attention.

“How long would it take him to fix on a particular woman? Would it be an instantaneous thing?”

“Could be. More likely, though, it would be some kind of encounter. An exposure, a conversation. He might make some kind of assessment of her vulnerability. Remember, this may be a very intelligent man. Eventually, though, it goes beyond his control. She becomes fixed in his mind, and he can no more escape her image than she can escape his attack.”

“Jesus. Uh, sorry.”

She smiled at him. “You just didn’t get enough of it, you know? If you’d stayed at St. Agnes for another two, three years, who knows? Maybe it’d be Father Davenport.”

Lucas laughed. “That’s a hair-raising thought,” he said. “Can you see me running the little ankle-biters through First Communion?”

“Yes,” she said. “In fact, I can.”

The phone was ringing when Lucas got back to his office. It was Carla. She thought the shoes on the maddog were the Nike Air model, but she was not sure which variation.

“But the bubble thing on the sole is right. There wasn’t anything else like it,” she said.

“Thanks, Carla. See you tomorrow.”

Lucas spent ten minutes calling discount shoe stores, getting prices, and then walked up the stairs to the homicide office. Anderson was sitting in his cubbyhole, looking at papers.

“Am I set on the meeting?” Lucas asked.

“Yep. Just about everybody will be there,” Anderson said. He was a shabby man, too thin, with nicotine-stained teeth and small porcine eyes. His necktie was too wide and usually ended in the middle of his stomach, eight inches above his belt. His grammar was bad and his breath often smelled of sausage. None of it meant much to his colleagues. Anderson had a better homicide-clearance rate than any other man in the department. On his own time he wrote law-enforcement computer-management programs that sold across the country. “There’ll be four missing, but they’re pretty marginal anyway. You can talk to them later if you want.”

“What about the union?”

“We cooled them out. The union guy will give a statement before you talk.”

“That sounds good,” Lucas said. He took out his notebook. “I’ve got some stuff I want to get in the data base.”

“Okay.” Anderson swiveled in his chair and punched up his IBM. “Go ahead.”

“He’s very light-complexioned, which means he’s probably blond or sandy-haired. Probably an office worker or a clerk of some kind, maybe a professional, and reasonably well-off. May have been born in the Southwest. New Mexico, like that. Arizona. Texas. May have moved up here fairly recently.”

Anderson punched it into the computer and when he was done, looked up with a frown. “Jesus, Davenport, where’d you get this?”

“Talking to Ruiz. They’re guesses, but I think they’re good. Now. Have somebody go around to the post offices and pull the change-of-address forms for anybody coming in from those areas. Add Oklahoma. Everybody who moved into the seven-county metro area from those places.”

“There could be hundreds of them.”

“Yeah, but we can eliminate a lot of them right off the bat. Too old, female, black, blue-collar, originally from here and moving back . . . Besides, hundreds are better than millions, which is what we got now. Once we get a list, we might be able to cross-reference against some other lists, if we get any more.”

Anderson pursed his lips and then nodded. “I’ll do it,” he said. “We got nothing else.”

They met in the same room where the press conference had been held the night before, thirty-odd cops and civilians, an assistant city attorney, three union officials. They stopped talking when Lucas entered the room.

“All right,” he said, standing at the front. “This is serious. We want the union to talk first.”

One of the union men stood, cleared his throat, looked at a piece of paper, folded it, and stuck it back in his coat pocket.

“Normally, the union would object to what’s going to happen here. But we talked it over with the chief and I guess we’ve got no complaint. Not at this point. Nobody is being accused of anything. Nobody’s going to be forced to do anything. We think for the good of the force that everybody ought to hear what Davenport’s going to say.”

He sat down and the cops looked back at Lucas.

“What I’m going to say is this,” Lucas said, scanning the crowd. “Somebody took a piece out of the property room. It was a Smith, Model 15. From the David L. Losse box. You remember the Losse case, it was the guy who lit up his kid? Said it was an accident? Went down on manslaughter?” Several heads nodded.

“Anyway, it was probably somebody in this room who took it. Most of the people with access are here. Now, that gun was used by this maddog killer. We want to know how he got it. We don’t think anybody here is the maddog. But somebody here, somehow, got this gun out to him.”

Several cops started to speak at the same time, but Lucas put up his hand and silenced them.

“Wait a minute. Listen to the rest of it. There might be any number of reasons somebody thought it was a good idea to take the piece. It’s a good gun and maybe somebody needed a backup piece. Or a piece for his wife, for home protection, and it got stolen. Whatever. The maddog gets his hands on it. We’re looking for the connection.

“Now, the chief is going to put IAD on it and they’re going to be talking to every one of you. They’re not going to do anything else until they find out what happened.”

Lucas paused and looked around the room again.

“
Unless,
” he said. “Unless somebody comes forward and tells me what happened. I give you these guarantees. First, I don’t tell anybody else. I don’t cooperate with IAD. And once we know, well, the chief admits there’d be no reason to really push the investigation. We got better things to do than chase some guy who took a gun.”

Lucas pointed at the assistant city attorney. “Tell them about the punishment ruling.”

The attorney stepped toward the center of the room and cleared his throat. “Before the chief can discipline a man, he has to give specific cause. We’ve ruled if the cause is alleged criminal wrongdoing, he has to provide the same proof as he would in court. He is not allowed to punish on a lesser standard. In other words, he can’t say, ‘Joe Smith, you’re demoted because you committed theft.’ He has to prove the theft to the same standards as he would in court—actually, for practical purposes, he has to get a conviction.”

Lucas took over again.

“What I’m saying is, you call me, tell me where to meet you. Bring a lawyer if you want. I’ll refuse to read you your rights. I’ll admit to entrapment. I’ll do anything reasonable that would kill my testimony in court. That way, even if I talked, you couldn’t be punished. And I won’t talk.

“You guys know me. I won’t burn you. And we’ve got to catch this guy. I’m passing out my card, I’ve written my home phone number on the back. I want everyone to put the card in his pocket, so the guy who needs it won’t be out there by himself. I’ll be home all night.” He handed a stack of
business cards to a cop in the front row, who took one, divided the rest in half, and passed them in two directions.

“Tell them the rest of it, Davenport,” said the union man.

“Yeah, the rest of it,” said Lucas. “If nobody talks to me, we push the IAD investigation and we push the murder investigation. Sooner or later we’ll identify the guy who took the gun. And if we have to do it that way . . .”

He tried to pick out each face in the room before he said it: “ . . . we’ll find a felony to hang on it. We’ll put somebody in Stillwater.”

An angry buzz spread through the group.

“Hey, fuck it,” Lucas said, raising his voice over the noise. “This guy’s butchered three women in the worst way you could do it. Go ask homicide if you want the details. But don’t give me any brotherhood shit. I don’t like this any better than you guys. But I need to know about that piece.”

Anderson caught him in the hall after the meeting.

“What do you think?”

Lucas nodded down the hallway, where a half-dozen of his cards littered the floor.

“Most of them kept the cards. I’ve got nothing to do but go home and wait.”

Bats flicked through his head, bats with razor-edged wings that cut like fire. Monsters. Kill factor low, but they were virtually transparent, like sheets of broken glass, and almost impossible to see at night in the thorn brush outside the dark castle . . .

Lucas looked up at the clock. Eleven-forty. Damn. If the cop who took the gun was planning to call, he should have done it. Lucas looked at the phone, willing it to ring.

It rang. He nearly fell off his drawing stool in surprise.

“Yes?”

“Lucas? This is Jennifer.”

“Hey. I’m expecting a call. I need the line open.”

“I got a tip from a friend,” Jennifer said. “He says there was a survivor. Somebody who fought off the killer. I want to know who it was.”

“Who told you this bullshit?”

“Don’t play with me, Lucas. I got it solid. She’s some kind of Chicana or something.”

Lucas hesitated and realized a split second later that his hesitation had given it away. “Listen, Jennifer, you got it, but I’m asking you not to use it. Talk to the chief first.”

“Look. It’s a hell of a story. If somebody else gets onto it and breaks it, I’d feel like an idiot.”

“It’s yours, okay? If we have to break her out, we’ll get you in first. But the thing is, we don’t want the killer to start thinking about her again. We don’t want to challenge him.”

“C’mon, Lucas . . .”

“Listen, Jennifer. You listening?”

“Yeah.”

“If you use this before you talk to the chief, I’ll find some way to fuck with you. I’ll tell every TV station in the world how you fed the name and address of an innocent woman to a maddog killer and made her a target for murder and rape. I’ll put you right in the middle of the controversy, and that means you’ll lose your piece of it. You’ll be doing dog-sled stories out of Brainerd.”

“I heard he hit her in her apartment, so he already knows—”

“Sure. And after about a week of argument, that’d probably come out too. In the meantime, the local feminists would be doing a tap dance on your face and you wouldn’t be able to get a job anywhere east of the Soviet Union.”

“So fuck you, Lucas. When can I talk to Daniel?”

“What time you want him?”

“Nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll call him right now. You be down there at nine.”

He dropped the phone in its cradle, looked at it for a second, picked it up, and dialed Daniel’s home phone. The chief’s wife answered and a moment later put Daniel on the phone.

“You got him?” He sounded like he was talking around a bagel.

“Yeah, right,” Lucas said dryly. “Go stand on the curb in front of your office and I’ll drop him off in twenty minutes. If I’m late, don’t worry, I’ll be along. Just wait there on the curb.”

The chief chewed for a minute, then said, “Pretty fuckin’ funny, Davenport. What do you want?”

“Jennifer Carey just called. Somebody told her about Ruiz.”

“Shit. Wasn’t you, was it?”

“No.”

“Somebody told me you were puttin’ the pork to the young lady.”

“Jesus Christ . . .”

“Okay, okay. Sorry. So what do you think?”

“I shut her mouth for the time being. She’s coming down to your office to see you tomorrow. Nine o’clock. I’d like to hold her off Ruiz for at least a couple of days. But if somebody tipped her, it’s going to get out.”

“So?”

“So when she sees you tomorrow, tell her to hold off a couple of days and then we’ll set up an interview for her, if Ruiz will go along. Then, if Ruiz is willing to go along, we’ll set up an interview for six o’clock in the evening and let Jennifer tape it for the late news. While I’m over there with her, you can call a press conference for eight o’clock or eight-thirty. Then I bring Ruiz over, we let the press yell at her for twenty minutes or so, and they get tape for ten o’clock.”

“Carey’ll be pissed if we burn her.”

“I’ll handle that. I’ll tell
her
that you wouldn’t go for an exclusive break, but she’s the only TV station with a personal interview. The other stations will have nothing but press-conference stuff. Then we’ll tell the
other
stations that Carey had a clean tip, had us against the wall, but because you’re their friend, you decided to go with a press conference. That way, everybody owes us.”

“How about the papers? They’re out of it.”

“We let them sit in on the interview with Carey so they can drop in long profiles. They won’t publish until the next morning anyway, so Jennifer still gets the break. I’ll feed it to the two papers as special treatment from you. I’ll let them know that the even-handedness could change if we start having trouble with them.”

“Okay. So tomorrow morning I’ll see Carey at nine o’clock, put her off, maybe feed her a tidbit. We can work all the rest out later, in detail.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Don’t forget the meeting.”

When he got off the phone, Lucas rubbed his eyes and bent over the drawing table again. He read penciled numbers from a list on a yellow legal pad, cranking them through an
electronic desk calculator. A near-empty coffee cup sat at the top of the table. He took a sip of the oily remnant and grimaced.

Lucas wrote games. Role-playing fantasies, Civil War historical reconstructions, combat simulations from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Stalingrad, Battle of the Bulge, Taipan, the Punch Bowl, Bloody Ridge, Dien Bien Phu, Tet.

The games were marketed through a New York publisher who would take all he could create, usually two a year. His latest was a role-playing fantasy adventure. They were the best moneymakers but the least intrinsically interesting.

He looked at the clock again. Twelve-ten. He walked over to the sound system, picked out a compact disc, slipped it in the player, and went back to the numbers as Eric Clapton started on “I Shot the Sheriff.”

The fantasy game’s story line was complicated. An American armored platoon was fighting in the Middle East at some unspecified time in the near future. The platoon got word that a tactical nuke was headed toward it and dug in the best it could.

At the instant of expected detonation, there was an intolerable flash and the platoon found itself—complete with M3 tanks—in Everwhen, a land of water and fens and giant oaks. Where magic worked and soulless fairies danced in the night.

The whole thing tended to give Lucas a headache. Every fantasy game in the world, he thought, had a bunch of computer freaks with swords wandering around Poe-esque landscapes with red-haired freckled beauties with large breasts.

But it was money; and he had a responsibility to the prepubescent intellectuals who might someday buy his masterpiece, the Grove of Trees. He thought about Grove for a minute, the Gettysburg game he was perfecting in the weekly bouts at St. Anne’s. Grove required an IBM computer and a separate, dedicated game room, along with teams of players. It took two nights just to set up the pieces. As a game it was impractical and unwieldy. But fascinating.

He tapped the pencil against his teeth and stared sightlessly over the drawing table. On the fifth night of the game, Jeb
Stuart was still out of touch with Lee, riding far to the east around the Union army that was slowly crawling north toward Gettysburg. That had happened in the actual conflict, but this time, in the game, Stuart—in the person of the St. Paul grocer—was moving more aggressively to close the gap and could reach Gettysburg in time to scout the good ground south of town.

In the meantime, Lee’s order of battle had been shuffled. As he closed through the mountains toward Gettysburg, Pickett’s division was in the lead and was hunting for bear. Even if Reynolds—a university student—got there ahead of Stuart, and Reynolds managed to stay alive, as he hadn’t in the original fight, Pickett’s aggressiveness might push him aside and allow the Confederates to take the hills at the end of Cemetery Ridge or even the entire ridge. If he did, then the gathering Union forces would have to choose between an offensive battle or retreating on Washington . . . .

Lucas sighed and wrenched his mind back to Everwhen, which was, naturally, under attack by the forces of evil. The armored platoon had been called in by a good wizard who planned to introduce a new element to what had been a losing war: technology. Once signed up with the forces for good, the armored platoon would march on the cloud-veiled castle of the Evil One.

The story was not particularly original. Working the details into a logical game was an ordeal.

Like the M3 tanks. Where did they get fuel and repairs? Magic. How did the platoon acquire magical talents? By valiant deeds. Save a virgin from a dragon and the magic quotient goes up. If the dragon kicks your ass, it goes down.

The creatures of Everwhen were a troublesome problem. They had to be dangerous, interesting, and reasonably original. They also had to be exotic, but familiar enough to be comprehensible. The best ones were morphologically related to familiar earth creatures: lizards, snakes, rats, spiders. Lucas spent dozens of winter evenings sitting in his leather chair in the den, a yellow pad on his lap, dreaming them up.

The slicers were one of them. A slicer was a cross between
a bat and a razor-edged plate of glass. Slicers attacked at night, slashing their targets to pieces. They were too stupid to be affected by magic, but were easy enough to kill with the right technology. Like shotguns.

But how would you even see them? Okay. Like bats, they used a kind of sonar. With the right magic, the platoon’s radios could be tuned to it. Could you get them all? Maybe. But if not, there were hit points to be worked out. So many hit points, and a character died. Lucas had to take care not to kill off the characters too easily. The players wouldn’t stand for it. Nor could the game be too simple. It was a matter of walking the line, of luring the players deeper and deeper into the carefully crafted scenarios.

He worked hunched over the drawing table in a pool of light created by the drafting lamp, hammering out the numbers, drinking coffee. When Clapton started on “Lay Down, Sally” he got up and did a neatly coordinated solo dance around the chair. Then he sat down, worked for fifteen seconds, and was back up with “Willie and the Hand Jive.” He danced in the dark room by himself, watching the song time counting down on the digital CD clock. When “Hand Jive” ended, he sat down again, called up a file on his IBM, read out the specs, and went back to the numbers after an almost unconscious glance at the clock. Twelve-fifteen.

Lucas lived in a three-bedroom ranch home, stone and cedar, across Mississippi Boulevard and a hundred feet above the river. When the leaves were off the trees in the fall and winter, he could see the lights of Minneapolis from his living room.

It was a big house. At first, he worried that it was too big, that he should buy a condominium. Something over by the lakes, where he could watch the singles out jogging, skating, sailing.

But he bought the house and never regretted it. He paid $120,000 for it, cash, in 1980. Now it was worth twice that. And in the back of his head, as he pushed into his thirties and contemplated the prospect of forty, he still thought of children and a place for them.

Besides, as it turned out, he quickly filled up the space. A beat-up Ford four-wheel-drive joined the five-year-old Porsche in the garage. The family room became a small gym, with free weights and a heavy bag, and a wooden floor where he did kata, the formal exercises of karate.

The den was converted to a library, with sixteen hundred novels and nonfiction works and another two hundred small volumes of poetry. A deep leather chair with a hassock for his feet, and a good light, were the main furnishings. For those times when reading didn’t appeal, he’d built in a twenty-five-inch color television, videotape player, and sound system.

Tools, laundry appliances, and outdoor sports gear were stored in the basement, along with a sophisticated reloading bench and a firearms locker. The locker was actually a turn-of-the-century bank safe. An expert cracksman could open it in twenty minutes, but Lucas didn’t expect any expert cracksmen to visit his basement. A snatch-and-run burglar wouldn’t have a chance against the old box.

Lucas owned thirteen guns. His daily working weapon was a nine-millimeter Heckler & Koch P7 with a thirteen-shot clip. He also carried, on occasion, a nine-millimeter Beretta 92F. Those, and the small ankle gun, were kept on a concealed shelf in his workroom desk.

The basement locker contained two Colt .45 Gold Cups, both further customized by a Texas gunsmith for combat target competition, and three .22’s, including a Ruger Mark II with a five-and-a-half-inch bull barrel, a Browning International Medalist, and the only nonautomatic, a bolt-action Anschutz Exemplar.

In the bottom of the locker, carefully oiled, wrapped, and packaged, were four pistols he’d picked up on the job. Street guns, untraceable to anyone in particular. The last weapon, also kept in the locker, was a Browning Citori over-and-under twenty-gauge shotgun, the upland version. He used it for hunting.

Of the rest of the house, the two smaller bedrooms actually had beds in them.

The master bedroom became his workroom, with a drawing table, drafting instruments, and the IBM. There were two walls of books on weapons and armies—on Alexander and Napoleon and Lee and Hitler and Mao, details of Bronze Age spears and Russian tanks and science-fiction fantasies that discussed seeker-killer shells, rail guns, plasma rifles, and nova bombs. Ideas that he would weave into the net of a game. The slicers flitted through Lucas’ mind like splinters as he worked over the drawing table, hammering out the numbers.

When the phone rang, he jumped. It seldom rang; few people had the number. Thirty-odd more this evening, he thought, laying his pencil on the table. He glanced at the clock: twelve-twenty-two. He stepped across the room, turned down the CD player, started the tape recorder he’d attached to the receiver, and picked up the extension.

“Yes?”

“Davenport?” A man’s voice. Middle-aged, or a little past it.

“Yeah.”

“You taping this?” Vaguely familiar. He knew this man.