21
AN HOUR AFTER Lucas got back to BCA headquarters, the cops at Minneapolis–St. Paul International called and said they had the MDX. “We haven’t opened it,” the cop said. “I can see what looks like a parking ticket on the floor—that’d give us an exact time it came in.”
“Don’t touch it,” Lucas said. “I’m sending my crime-scene guys over. Have somebody stand by the truck.”
While the crime-scene truck rolled, Lucas got the co-op center calling the airlines, looking for the ride that O’Donnell took out of town. He watched them work it for a while, got bored when nothing happened, walked down to the canteen, and got a cup of coffee.
Hopping Crow called: “The blood in the refrigerator was frozen, of course. We don’t have a DNA yet, maybe by tomorrow. I can tell you that it’s human, and that it’s Charlie Pope’s blood type. Pope was an O positive, O’Donnell’s records say he’s an A positive. So.”
“So Pope’s blood was in O’Donnell’s freezer.”
“Probably his. Peterson’s was also O, but we don’t have any reason to think her blood was frozen.”
HE WAS IN his office when the Crime Scene crew called. “The parking ticket on the floor was from seven o’clock last night.”
“I’ll pass it on to the coordination center. What else?”
“Nothing really, just the usual car junk. He was pretty neat. We’ll be done in a half hour. You want us to take it to the impound?”
“Yeah. Seal it up. We may want to go over it with a microscope, depending on how things break.”
The same guy called back twenty minutes later. “We found some blood. It was under the mat in the cargo compartment. It looks relatively fresh . . . it’s dry, but not dusty. Thought you ought to know.”
“We need a blood type and DNA,” Lucas said. “Get it back here as quick as you can.”
THEY WERE RUNNING NOW. He got another blood type: it was O again, could be Pope, could be Peterson. He made a mental bet on Peterson. He called Hopping Crow, to tell him to push the tests. “We’ll know by tomorrow night,” Hopping Crow said. “Who knows, maybe it’s somebody else?”
“Don’t even think that.”
They picked up bits and pieces of information about O’Donnell and his lifestyle all through the day, but nothing that would point a finger. Cops were talking with a kayak club, a singles cycling club, the last woman O’Donnell was known to have dated. She said, “It came down to a choice between me and the Pontiac, and I had the feeling I wasn’t going to win. So we sort of broke it off . . .”
Early in the day, Lucas felt that the logjam was breaking, that the ice was going out, that the peel was coming off the banana. And then everything slowed, and he began to see nothing but trivia . . . He wandered out of the office at nine o’clock, discouraged.
Where the f*ck was he?
RUFFE IGNACE LAY AWAKE in bed, listening to Ruffe’s Radio, cataloging the day’s events and insults: What the f*ck is she doing, telling me that I have to watch my adverbs? She wouldn’t know an adverb if one jumped up and bit her on the tit. Green is a bad color for me, it makes my skin look yellow; gotta get rid of the green golf shirt. I wonder if my dick reaches up to my bellybutton when I’m really hard? I don’t think it does. Does anybody’s? Maybe I oughta get dressed and go out for a slice . . .
When the phone rang, he said, “Pope,” and he scrambled through the dark to the phone charger, fumbled with the phone, punched the TALK button: “Ignace.”
And it was: “Hey, Ruffe. Thought I’d call you and say good-bye.”
“Good-bye? Where are you now?”
A rumbling, wheezing, whispery laugh, and then, “If this phone is tapped, you’ll find out soon enough. Anyway, the police were getting too close: this Davenport guy is smarter than I expected.”
“I don’t know anything about that—as far as I know, they’ve got no idea where you are, Charlie.”
Another whispery chuckle: “That’s another thing. My name isn’t Charlie. Charlie, unfortunately for him, but not for the rest of us, is in a black bag somewhere. That’s what caused the trouble—I threw his dead ass into the river. Life was sweet until he came floatin’ up. Anyway, the cops found him, and they know.”
“They know they’re not looking for Charlie Pope? Jesus Christ . . . who is this, anyway?”
“They don’t know who I am yet, so I’m not going to tell you. In any case, I’m moving on. Maybe . . . New England. Manhattan. I’ve got to think, I’ve got to see what I’m becoming, the Gods Down the Hall . . .”
“They know you’re not Charlie . . . ?” Ignace was outraged: And they hadn’t told me?
“I’ll tell you something else: they might figure out who I was, but they don’t know who I’m becoming. And they don’t know who I’ve been, or how long I’ve been doing this . . .”
“Jesus, how many . . .”
“More’n you know, Roo-fay. The Gods Down the Hall told me I was growing. But they say that at some point, your control begins to fade, the appetite takes over. It’s dangerous, but it feels so good. I can feel that, now. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but now I do, and it feels wonderful. When it’s time to go, I’ll go, but I think . . . maybe I don’t want to go just yet. I want some more.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Change, Ruffe. Appetite. Blood. Moving . . . well, because you’re probably tapped, I’m going to go now. Got to keep moving. Keep moving . . .”
He was gone.
Ignace stared at the phone for a few seconds, then jumped up, turned on a light, found his Palm Pilot, and brought up Davenport’s home number. Dialed.
LUCAS WAS STARTLED awake by the phone. His hardwired phone, not the cell phone. He glanced at the bedside clock, thought “Ignace,” and picked up the phone.
“He just called to say good-bye,” Ignace said without preamble. “He says he’s running. He also says he’s not Charlie Pope, that Charlie Pope is dead, and that you’ve known about that. That you’ve misled everyone . . .”
“Slow down, slow down . . . ,” Lucas said. He swung his feet to the floor, hunched over the phone. “We just found out about Pope. What’d he say? You say he’s running?”
“Who is he?”
“We’re not sure . . . this was on your cell phone?”
“Yeah. You should have it.”
“Listen, Ruffe, everybody I’ve talked to said you’re an a*shole, but you seem to do the work. Okay? That’s what I think. Just don’t give me any shit about misleading the press. We’re trying to save some poor innocent f*cker’s life, and we don’t even know who he or she is, yet. We’ve already failed to save three other innocent f*ckers. Okay? So don’t give me any shit, and when this is all done, I’ll sit down and talk to you. I’ll give you the whole thing. Not to TV, not to the Pioneer Press, not to anybody else there at the Strib. Just you.”
“You mean everything?” Ignace demanded. “When you get him, I get it first? If you get him?”
“No, not that. That’s going to be a breaking news story that we can’t contain,” Lucas said. “I mean an inside feature, a blow-by-blow of who said what and how we pushed this to where we are . . .”
A moment of silence, then: “Deal. I think. I’m gonna have to talk to the boss about Pope.”
“Tell her to call me. Tell her to call. In the morning. I gotta hang up now and listen to the tape. I gotta find out where the call came from. I’ll be in touch.”
O’DONNELL HAD CALLED from Chicago. Lucas called the Chicago cops, asked for help: a detective called back half an hour later and said, “Not much we can do for you, pal. That number’s a pay phone out at O’Hare. This guy going somewhere?”
“The phone’s in the airport?” Lucas asked.
“No. A hotel just outside. A Hilton, with a phone in the lobby.”
“Could you check the register?”
“Nobody by that name,” the cop said. “What is it with this guy?”
“I kinda hate to tell you this . . .”
The Chicago cops were not happy with the news. “We got enough of this shit without importing yours.”
HE CALLED THE Minneapolis–St. Paul airport cops again, asked them to recheck airline tickets.
“We already did that,” an airport cop said.
“Yeah, but you did it in the afternoon. Now the guy shows up out by O’Hare at midnight. Maybe he was in the airport when you were looking for tickets. Maybe he didn’t fly until ten o’clock.”
“Listen, I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but we’ve got limited resources.”
“How about if the governor called you?”
WHEN HE WASN’T talking with cops, he listened to the recording of Ignace’s phone call. In terms of factual information, there wasn’t much, but there was that voice. He got Cale out of bed: “Who socialized with O’Donnell?”
“The junior staff . . . Probably the most active social person is Dr. Beloit.”
“Got her number?”
Beloit’s husband answered, got irate when Lucas asked for his wife, was skeptical when told it was a police emergency, and finally Lucas shouted at him: “I’m a state BCA agent, and I need to talk to your wife. Now. Or should I have a cop come over there and take her downtown?”
Beloit was dazed, being awakened at two in the morning. When she finally understood who was calling, he said, “I want you to call our headquarters in St. Paul. There’s a guy there, his name is Ted. He’ll play a tape of a call to a newspaper reporter earlier this evening. None of this is public: if you let this out, I’ll come down and run over you with my truck, okay?”
“Okay, but what do you want me to hear?”
“I want to know if it might be Sam O’Donnell calling. It doesn’t sound like him, but it does sound like somebody disguising his voice.”
“I heard people were looking for Sam . . . we were a little worried.”
“Who’s we?”
“Everybody.”
Lucas thought: Ah, shit. Everybody in the state would know in a couple of days . . . He said, “Just call Ted, okay? Here’s the number . . .”
SHE CALLED BACK five minutes later. “I hate to say this, but that could be Sam.”
“You think?”
“We have a Christmas play every year, and Bob Turner, I don’t think you’ve met Bob . . .”
“No.”
“. . . Bob plays Santa, and Sam plays one of Santa’s elves. Some of the patients have parts. You know. Anyway, Sam always plays the elf as a, mmm, pervert, for lack of a better word. He talks about going down chimneys and catching people making love. I mean, that’s sort of the running gag. Every chimney he goes down seems to have something going on. The thing is, he’s got this heavy-breathing thing going, that spit-in-the-back-of-the-throat whisper thing. This guy tonight . . . that sounds like Sam doing his act.”
Lucas couldn’t think of anything to say for a moment, then blurted out, “An elf?”
“Yeah, you know, everybody gets a little weird and we have a play . . .”
“But it could be him.”
“I don’t . . . I can’t see Sam O’Donnell hurting anyone, for any reason. I mean, he did the karate and all, but that was just exercise. He was really a gentle man, I think.”
IF THE KILLER was in Chicago, and he certainly was, then there wasn’t much to do except identify him—somebody else would make the eventual bust.
And though they didn’t have a hard identification on O’Donnell, if it wasn’t O’Donnell, that should be apparent in the morning, when somebody else didn’t show up for work.
Nothing to do now, at night . . . Lucas tried to sleep, and sometimes made it, mostly not. If they couldn’t make a clear identification, and if the killer ran far enough, interest would fall off . . . he could be gone for years.
He thrashed around, thrashed around, and finally got up at six o’clock. He’d never make it through the day like this, so he popped an amphetamine, quickly felt a lot better, shaved, showered, and dressed. Still early, but he called Sloan anyway. Sloan had Caller ID and groaned into the phone, “Lucas, you gotta get yourself a life. It’s not even seven o’clock in the morning.”
“Yeah, yeah, listen . . .”
Then, Sloan was suddenly awake: “Jesus: he didn’t do another one?”
“No, but he did call Ignace. He was in Chicago when he called.”
He and Sloan agreed to meet downtown at nine o’clock. “I’m gonna get Elle to come in. We need some more theory.”
TWO DAYS WENT BY:
ON THE FIRST DAY, Sam O’Donnell’s name got out as a “person of interest” in the case. None of the cops would confirm that O’Donnell was the man, and the media outlets were afraid to name him because of libel or slander potential, but most of the newsies knew, and Lucas heard that there were raging arguments going on about when to name him.
On the second day, the lab finished sequencing the DNA. The blood in the truck was Peterson’s.
“At some point, Peterson was in the back of that Acura and dribbled a little blood out,” John Hopping Crow told Lucas. “There wasn’t much, maybe an ounce or two . . . maybe blood that had gathered in her throat after he cut her windpipe and trachea when he gutted her . . .”
“Did you look at it through a scope?”
“Yeah. It was never frozen.”
The blood from inside the freezer had been frozen, of course—and the DNA was Charlie Pope’s.
“The sonofabitch cut a chunk out of Pope, a finger or something, and stored it in his freezer in case he needed it,” Hopping Crow said.
“He knew he was gonna need it—it was part of a plan that went way back before Pope was even killed,” Lucas said. “There was a lot of planning, strategy, going on. Like they were doing theory. The f*ckers down at St. John’s—Lighter, Taylor, and Chase—thought about it for a long time.”
“But we know some shit now . . .”
“Maybe. Listen, tell the crime-scene guys to pull anything out of the back of that truck that would carry DNA. We’re looking for something besides blood that has Peterson’s DNA. There must be hair, there must be something. Spit?”
ON BOTH THE first and second days, Lucas spoke with the Chicago cops and the Illinois State Police.
An investigator had interviewed the desk staff at the Hilton: “There’s not much,” he told Lucas. “Nobody recognized the O’Donnell mug, but they said probably a hundred people used that phone last night. There were people checking in all the time; this is a major business-travelers’ hotel. One guy said the mug looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t swear that the guy he saw was O’Donnell. Every maid and every staff member will get a copy of the photo when they check in for work, but the way he’s been jerking you guys around, I’d say it’s a million to one that he’d still be here.”
“Taxis? Car rentals?”
“We’re covering them with the mug shots. If the Xerox machine don’t break down, we’ll get them to everybody. Not coming up with anything so far.”
“Nobody saw him in the airport.”
“A few people said they saw somebody like him, but he’s sort of a type, you know? The long hair, the earring, sort of an upscale rocker. They’re a dime a dozen.”
“Yeah.”
“But what I’m wondering is, Why do we think he stopped at the Hilton, made the call, and then kept going? Maybe he wants us to think he stayed on the ground. How do we know he didn’t hop a ride to the Hilton, make the call, then go right back to O’Hare and fly? He could be in Amsterdam or Hong Kong by now.”
ON THE EVENING of the second day, Channel Three named O’Donnell as a “person of interest.” The story went network: on the night of the second day, CNN was running O’Donnell’s face every fifteen minutes.
Neil Mitford, the governor’s top political operator, called Lucas on the afternoon of the second day and said, “We had a press conference this afternoon on the compromises in the aid-to-cities package. Somebody asked if we shouldn’t cut our state hospital staff, since we’re apparently hiring psychopaths.”
“Ah, jeez. Not even the TV people are that dumb.”
“Of course not. They were plunking the governor’s magic twanger. But we’re starting to get a little bleed-through. So, if you don’t mind, why don’t you just go ahead and pick this guy up and get him out of our hair?”
“Why don’t you do it?” Lucas suggested. “The headline would say HATCHET MAN CAPTURES AXE MURDERER.”
“I’m just sayin’,” Mitford said mildly. “I’m not leaning on you, I’m just sayin’: if you’re not doing anything else, pick him up.”
“You do a swell job of leaning on a guy,” Lucas said.
ALSO ON THE FIRST DAY, Elle arrived early, having ditched her summer seminar, and dug through O’Donnell’s personnel file. When she was finished, she came and sat in Lucas’s office, and said, “I want to interview the staff members down at St. John’s. Also, any family members that we can reach.”
“I can get you down to St. John’s for sure,” Lucas said. “Let’s do it tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do about family members. What do you think so far?”
“O’Donnell has the intelligence and the planning capability. In school, he had nearly a four-point from his freshman year straight through to his Ph.D. That takes more than intelligence, it takes a ferocious will. If he ran off the tracks, somehow, he could do this. He is what I expected, except . . . he seems to have been very well liked and respected. That would not be typical. Typically, people with this kind of problem are recognized as being odd, and it shows in their histories.”
“Okay: so family and friends should tell us something. I’ll see what I can do.”
BOTH THE CO-OP and security hospital people had called O’Donnell’s parents to see if he’d been in touch. His parents were frantic, not knowing what was going on—they’d gotten the impression that their son might have been a victim of the killer. They agreed to talk to Elle at St. John’s.
ON THE MORNING of the second day, Sloan went with Elle to St. John’s to interview staff members and the parents. When Sloan got back, he pushed into Lucas’s office, and said, “You f*cker, you’ve driven with her before. That’s why you didn’t go with us.”
“Come on, man—if the three of us had gone, I would have driven.” But Lucas half laughed, because he knew what Sloan was talking about.
“Sometimes, she’d get out of control and penetrate the forty-five-mile-an-hour barrier,” Sloan said. “I thought I was gonna start screaming before we got there. Now I know how Chase feels, down in isolation.”
“Maybe you should have offered to drive,” Lucas suggested.
“I did. Several times. She said she needed the practice. Going down was a nightmare. Coming back was . . .” Words failed, and he flapped his arms.
“Where is she, anyway?” Lucas asked.
“She stopped in the ladies’ room. If she pees the way she drives, we could be waiting for a while.”
ELLE SAID THIS: “I talked to his parents, I talked to his friends. There’s a very interesting thing that goes on with serial killers. When they have longtime friends, or parents, those people usually aren’t surprised by the accusations when they’re caught. They know that there’s something wrong with them. There’s often a history of strange violence during their youth—against animals and insects, against other children; and they’re usually victims of some kind of violence, usually physical, but sometimes purely emotional. There’s often an interest in fire and in general images of destruction. I’m not talking about the interest that you find in game players, but about a kind of fascination with the most grotesque elements of death and dismemberment. Also, there are commonly instances of head injuries . . .”
“And . . .”
“There’s none of that in his history. Lucas, I’m coming to the conclusion that he is not our man.”
“Then he’s dead,” Lucas said.
“That may be so.”
“Don’t tell me that,” Lucas said. He was groping: “How about a tumor, or something. Remember the Texas Tower, Whitman?”
“Yes . . .”
“There was a song about him, how he had a tumor in his brain,” Lucas said. “Something like that.”
“Yes. There was a song, I believe by a person named Richard Friedman. And Whitman did have a tumor, although they don’t know if it was responsible for his behavior.”
“What if O’Donnell had a tumor?”
“That’s a possibility—when you’re dealing with the brain, almost anything is possible. However, when there’s a tumor involved, there are physical symptoms as well as psychological upsets, and none of his family and friends saw anything like that.”
“How do you explain the fact that he took all the money out of his bank account the day he disappeared?”
She smiled and shook her head: “I don’t explain it. I leave that up to you.”
SLOAN, who had been watching the interchange, said, “Nordwall had a couple of deputies trying to find out where O’Donnell was the night Peterson disappeared. They can’t find him. They can’t find him on the nights that Larson or the Rices were killed, either—but that might not mean much. He lived out in the woods, and the Rices and Larson are far enough back that nobody really can put their finger on whether they saw him or not.”
“Mention the shift problem,” Elle said.
“Yeah, the shift,” Sloan said. “He worked a seven-to-three shift, but he always came in early, around six o’clock, to get the handoff from the overnight. That means he had to get up around five o’clock, and if he wanted to get eight hours of sleep, he was in bed by nine. So. People wouldn’t expect to see him late on the nights of the killings, but it would be absolutely normal for him to be in bed. Legitimately.”
“God . . . bless me,” Lucas said.
“HERE’S A QUESTION,” Sloan said. “He didn’t come into work—so presumably he was (a) on his way to Chicago or was already there, or (b) he was dead. Assuming he went to Chicago after work on the day he decided to run, sometime around seven o’clock, he would have been there by, say, nine o’clock. He didn’t call Ignace for more than twenty-four hours. What was he doing?”
“Making . . . arrangements,” Lucas said. Elle wasn’t there at the moment, so he added, “How the f*ck would I know?”
“Maybe we ought to call Chicago Homicide, see if they’ve had anything particularly rude . . .”
CHICAGO HOMICIDE had one murder reported for the night O’Donnell disappeared: a twelve-year-old boy named Terence Smith had run over his uncle, Roger Smith, with Roger’s own car.
“They’re sure it’s murder?” Lucas asked Sloan.
“He ran over him eight or ten times. They said Roger’s head looked like a thin-crust pizza.”
“Ah.”
“What next?” Sloan asked. “Where do we go?”