23
FOR A MOMENT, Lucas experienced the kind of disorientation he might have felt in a falling elevator.
Then he said, “I beg your pardon? Who is this?”
The Cancun guy said, “Leo Grant. Who are you?”
“Uh . . . Lucas Davenport—I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We have had a series of murders here . . . one of the people we’re investigating is a Leopold Grant, a psychologist who works at the St. John’s Security Hospital. He shows references from the West Bend Hospital in Boulder, Colorado.”
There followed a moment of silence, then a crunching sound, as if the man on the other end of the line had bitten off a piece of celery. Then, “How do I know this isn’t a stupid pet trick?”
“Do you have a line to the States?” Lucas asked.
“Well, sure.”
“Call directory assistance for Minnesota, ask for the number for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Under the listings for the state of Minnesota. Call that number, then ask for me: My name is Lucas Davenport, L-u-c-a-s D-a-v-e-n-p-o-r-t . . . This is critical: do it right away.”
“I’ll call you right back.” There was a final chewing crunch, and then the line went dead.
LUCAS, HIS HEART suddenly booming, stuck his head out the office door. “Carol: run down to the co-op center, tell them we need every speck of information we can get on Leo Grant, the psychologist at St. John’s.”
“Leo Grant . . .”
“Run.”
LUCAS TOOK A COUPLE of turns around his office, thinking about Grant. He was well spoken, soft faced . . . but he’d also hung out with Sam O’Donnell, would have known about O’Donnell’s Christmas voice, had worked with Charlie Pope and the Big Three. Could have passed word of Peterson’s murder . . .
And going way back, he was the one who said that Charlie was smarter than he looked, that Charlie might go for college girls, that there might be a second man or woman. Jesus. He’d been steering them from the start.
“Ah, man.” He looked at the phone: “Call, motherf*cker.”
A MINUTE LATER, the phone rang. “This is Leo Grant from Cancun.”
“Yeah, Dr. Grant. This is Davenport. Are you satisfied?”
“Yes, I guess so,” Grant said. “What’s going on? Murders?”
“We’ve got a guy who had access to all the major players in a series of murders. He says he’s a psychologist, and that his name is Leopold Grant . . .”
“That seems unlikely . . .”
“. . . who did his school at Colorado and then worked at West Bend. He has a set of references from West Bend. Wait, he has a transcript from Colorado that was sent to a 2319 Eleanor Street . . .”
“You’ve got a fraud on your hands, then,” Grant said. “That was my address when I was a graduate student. I’ve never met or heard of another Leopold Grant. If there was another doc in the field with the same name, I would have heard—if he were legit, anyway. If he contributed to the literature.”
“Do you have any idea how this Leopold Grant could have gotten his hands on your files?” Lucas asked. He thumbed through the “Leo Grant” file from St. John’s. “There are references here . . . Is Douglas Carmichael a real guy? He’s shown here as . . .”
“. . . director of psychiatric medicine at West Bend. He’s real. It’s on letterhead paper, I assume.”
“Yes, it is.”
“If you’ve got a transcript and all that other stuff, then I’d say that somebody probably got to the personnel files at West Bend,” Grant said. “Have you seen this Leo Grant? What does he look like?”
“He’s a pretty good-looking guy,” Lucas said. “Six feet tall, dark hair, dark eyes. He’s thin—wiry—high cheekbones. He dresses well, he’s well spoken. He seems pretty smart. He uses big words sometimes, I thought maybe he was showing off, but it seems pretty natural . . .”
“Oh, boy . . . does he have a tattoo on his upper arm? Like a barbed-wire thing?”
“Ah, shit.” Lucas dropped the phone to his thigh and put his hands over his eyes. The hookers at the Rockyard, they’d mentioned the tattoo. He’d never thought about it again. If he’d lined up all the possibilities, had all the men roll up their sleeves, Peterson would be alive.
He put the phone back to his ear and Grant was saying, “Hello? Are you still there?”
“I’m here. I just . . . remembered something. Another witness mentioned seeing a man with that tattoo talking to one of the victims. Goddamnit.”
“If it’s who I think it is, you’ve got a serious problem,” Grant said. “There was a patient named Roy Rogers at West Bend. Roy Rogers wasn’t his real name, but we never found out what his real name was. He killed a man in Denver, a street guy. He’d sat on the guy and nearly cut his head off with a piece of glass. This was over a radio. The cops figured it must have taken five minutes to get the job done: he started around back and sawed halfway through the guy’s neck.”
“The guy we’re looking for has slashed the throats of all three victims . . . You turned this Rogers guy loose?”
“No—he turned himself loose. I ran into one of my college pals at a convention in Chicago, and he mentioned it. Roy was supposedly in a secure area, but somebody left a door unlocked, or ajar, and he walked down through a mechanical area and out the other side. The staff thinks he rode out in the back of a food truck. Nobody’s seen him since.”
“Is he smart? Any connection with California that you know of?” Lucas asked.
“He’s very bright—his IQ, by the old standards, would have been considered genius level. We don’t call it that anymore, but he’s smart. And he came from California.”
“Ah. Thank you . . .”
The Cancun Leo Grant was into it now, his voice intense: Lucas realized that he sounded like the fake Leo Grant: “The thing is, whatever his name is, if his story is true . . . Roy’s the poster boy for unwanted children. He said he grew up locked in his room—he didn’t even have a window. When I pushed him on it, I got the impression that his ‘room’ might have been a walk-in closet. He wasn’t tortured or sexually abused, he was just locked away. His story’s a horror, depending on how much you could believe.”
“How much did you believe?” Lucas asked.
Grant considered for a moment, then said, “About the growing-up part, I believed most of it. He says the cops came and got him when he was nine or ten—he didn’t actually know how old he was—and put him in a foster home. He might have been in the closet from the time he was a baby. He said he ran away from the foster home after a while and grew up on the beach at Venice. The thing about Roy was . . .”
Grant paused again, and Lucas prompted him, “Yeah? What?”
“Roy has no real personality of his own,” Grant said. “That’s not exactly right, but you can think of him that way. He takes on the personality of the people he’s most impressed with. That’s how he pulled off this fraud at your security hospital. At West Bend, during treatment sessions, he talked and behaved like a staff member. But if you saw him around the orderlies, he acted and talked like an orderly. Once, in a group-therapy session, with a man who’d been accused of killing his wife . . . I saw him take on the other man’s personality in just a matter of a couple of sessions. He picked up the other guy’s mannerisms and way of talking, his gestures, facial tics . . . It was like the other guy had been poured into him.”
“That explains a lot,” Lucas said. “Listen, Dr. Grant, I’m gonna pick this guy up, right now. We’d appreciate it if you’d come up, help us talk with him. The state will pay all your expenses and a fee, of course . . .”
“I can do that,” Grant said. “This is a shock, of course. I’d like to talk to the hospital staff up there, and I’d like to see Roy again. Just to hear his story.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
“You know where he got the name? Roy Rogers?” Grant asked.
“From the cowboy guy?”
“Nope. Well, indirectly. He got it from a fast-food restaurant. Said it was the best place he ever ate, until he went to jail.”
LUCAS CALLED SLOAN: “It’s Leo Grant. I’ll tell you on the way down to get him.”
JENKINS ANSWERED HIS cell phone and said he was just getting a bite to eat. Shrake was with him. “We’re heading down to the security hospital,” Lucas said. “I want you guys with us.”
“We got a break?”
“Yeah. I’m gonna run over to Minneapolis and pick up Sloan . . .” They agreed to meet at a gas station in the town of Shakopee, on the edge of the metro area.
“Listen, Shrake and me have been talking,” Jenkins said. “That list of yours . . . It’s gotta have “F*ck the Police,” right? NWA?”
THE MINNEAPOLIS CITY HALL was an ugly building, a pile of purple stone almost exactly the color, Lucas had once realized after a hunting trip, of fresh deer turds. Sloan was standing on the sidewalk outside. Lucas pulled up beside him, and he jumped into the truck.
“Tell me,” he said.
So Lucas told him, and Sloan was properly astonished. He said, “I forgot all about those hookers, and the tattoo. It all seemed so . . . distant.”
“There ought to be some kind of cop computer program,” Lucas said. “Like a spreadsheet. You’d put in all the facts that you have, all the suppositions, and rank the suppositions by credibility. Then you’d put in all the suspects, and the program would remind you of what you need to do. If we had something like that, that never forgot anything . . .”
“We’d spend all of our time typing shit into it,” Sloan said.
“Yeah, but we would have had everybody rolling their sleeves up . . . Goddamnit.”
THEY TALKED ABOUT the details of the case on the way out of town; stopped at Shakopee and waited for five minutes until Jenkins and Shrake arrived, filled them in, and headed south again. Twenty miles out, Sloan asked, “You think we ought to call the sheriff?”
“No. This kind of thing gets around too fast. I want to have Grant on the ground, with cuffs on him, before anybody even knows we’re coming.”
Sloan looked at his watch. “His shift is gonna be over about now.”
“Ah . . . ,” Lucas glanced at his own watch. “Call Dr. Cale. Ask him to find out if Grant’s gone yet. Tell him not to be obvious about it.”
Sloan dialed, got Cale, asked, listened, and said, “Just a minute.” He took the phone down and said, “Grant left early—half an hour or forty-five minutes ago.”
“Uh-oh. Does Cale know why?”
Sloan asked, listened, then said, “No. He doesn’t know why. He just saw him going out through the security wall, and he was carrying a briefcase and looked like he was in a hurry. Cale assumed he was leaving.”
“Get a home address. Tell Cale not to mention this, in case he comes back there.”
WHILE SLOAN GOT THE address, Lucas pulled out his cell phone and tapped the speed dial for the office. Carol answered: “Carol, check with the co-op guys. When I told them to get every speck of information on Grant . . . did they call the hospital directly?”
She called back: “Yes. They talked to a couple of people. They got the name of a Mrs. Hardesty in Personnel.”
Lucas hung up and looked at Sloan. “He might know we’re coming.”
SLOAN CALLED JENKINS and Shrake in the trailing car, and they pulled into a gas station. The software on Lucas’s navigation system wouldn’t allow an address to be entered while the truck was moving; he punched it in, got a map, and they took off again.
“Maybe we better call the sheriff now,” Sloan suggested, when they were back on the road. “Get somebody looking for his car.”
“Do it,” Lucas said.
Sloan called the Department of Motor Vehicle Registration, identified himself, and gave them Grant’s name and address. A moment later he had the car and the tag number. He caught Nordwall in his office, and Lucas listened as Sloan outlined the situation. Then Sloan said, “I’ve got the car, tag, and his address. We’re coming up on the address, we’re just outside of Mankato, now. We’re only about a mile out . . .”
He gave Nordwall the description of the car, the tag number, and the address, listened for a moment, said, “Yeah, I can hold. What’s going on?”
Lucas glanced at Sloan, who shrugged, then the sheriff came back up and Sloan, suddenly intent, “Uh-huh, ah, jeez, it’s gotta be related. We’re gonna be there in a minute. See you there.”
“What?” Lucas asked.
“There’s been some kind of hassle, some kind of attack on a college kid, right there at Grant’s address. There are a couple of cars on the way, nobody on the scene yet. The sheriff heard the call through his nine-one-one monitor, less than a minute ago. The address rang a bell.”
“Goddamnit . . . Call the city cops. Tell them we’re coming in.”