27
THE HOSPITAL WAS A SHAMBLES.
A half dozen fires and two dozen fights added to the chaos of the shootings. When the smoke got dense in one wing of the security section, maintenance men used a forklift to break through a locked door to the outside, and frightened, angry, and medicated patients scattered over half a square mile of woods and farmland.
The Big Three, with Grant, killed six people and seriously wounded eight more. The final death toll, including the four killers, was ten.
Of the three people in the cage, one, a woman, had survived because Beloit had gotten to her quickly enough to keep her from drowning in her own blood. The bullet had gone through her cheekbone, her palate, and out through a jawbone, taking along a couple of upper teeth.
The shooting was ending when the fire department got to the hospital, and the paramedics, and three doctors in the hospital itself, quickly got to the other shooting victims.
LUCAS WAS TAKEN to the hospital in Mankato. Sloan rode with him. Sloan kept saying, “This is not a problem. This is not a problem . . .”
Lucas finally said, “Sloan, shut the f*ck up. This is definitely a problem.”
THE MORE SERIOUSLY INJURED were flown to Regions Hospital in St. Paul or to the Mayo in Rochester, except for two who needed immediate blood transfusions. They were taken to Mankato to be stabilized.
Lucas was evaluated at Mankato. The bone in his upper arm had been broken by Biggie’s bullet. The bullet itself had not gone through but was stuck on the underside of the skin at the back of his arm. With his good hand, Lucas could actually feel the bullet under the skin.
“So what?” he asked. “I’m gonna need a splint or something?”
“More than that,” the doc said. “We’ll have to go in there to put your arm back together. This will be a little complicated.”
After talking with Sloan, Lucas insisted on being reevaluated at Regions. He was flown out with one of the more severely wounded victims who had been taken to Mankato to be stabilized.
At Regions, as at Mankato, he was told that the arm would need an operation to place screws to hold the bones together. He could expect to be in a cast for three to six months; and there would be physical rehabilitation after that.
“Am I gonna lose anything? Any function?”
“Shouldn’t,” the doctor said. “Maybe a little sensation on the back of your arm.”
SLOAN, JENKINS, Shrake, Del, and Rose Marie crowded in to see him before the operation. Sloan had briefed Rose Marie on the shootings.
“There are already people running around, trying to figure out whom to hang,” Rose Marie said, before Lucas was rolled into the OR. “It’s amazing. It’s like the second reaction. The first is to ask how many are dead, the second is to ask whom we can hang.”
THE OPERATION TOOK two hours and was routine, the surgeon told Lucas in the recovery room. He was given additional sedation when he came out of the recovery room and slept through the night, waking at six o’clock.
A nurse came to see him: “Hurt?”
“Not much,” he said. “I’d like cup of coffee, is what I’d like. And a New York Times or a Wall Street Journal?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “How about a nice glass of orange juice?”
“How about if you hand me my cell phone? And I gotta take a leak . . .”
Both his arm and his face hurt—his nose had been recracked in the fight—but he was able to walk to the bathroom without a problem, pulling a saline drip along behind him.
The lying had already begun.
He added to it.
WEATHER CALLED AT SEVEN, an hour earlier than usual. She’d heard about the shooting after she’d finished her morning work in the operating theater, and called in a panic. Lucas had kept his cell phone on a bedside table.
“I’m fine,” Lucas lied. “But I gotta get into the office. There’s gonna be a political shit storm starting about ten o’clock. Soon as the politicians finish their double-latte grandes.”
“Were you involved in the shooting? Were you in there?” she asked, still scared.
“Yeah, I was right there,” Lucas said. “It’s a goddamn mess, Weather. I don’t want you to think about it. I gotta talk to everybody on the face of the earth in the next two days, covering our asses and getting the story right. I don’t want to have to worry about you, too.”
“You sound . . . hoarse.”
He was, from the anesthesia. He said, “I spent all yesterday screaming at people. I need a couple of cough drops.”
She asked, “What about Sloan?”
“He’s bummed. I gotta get to him, too,” Lucas said.
“Take care of yourself—don’t worry about everybody else,” Weather said.
“Hey, I’m fine,” he lied. When he hung up, he was satisfied that he’d pulled it off.
Then Weather called Sloan’s wife, worried about Sloan’s state of mind, and Sloan’s wife said, “We stayed for the operation, but Lucas was pretty groggy when he came out of it. They said everything went okay . . .”
“What operation?” Weather asked.
Lucas was talking to the docs about getting out and was being told “No,” when Weather called back.
“LUCAS . . . ,” she wailed.
“Ah, shit . . .”
Trapped like a rat.
SLOAN AND JENKINS lied about Biggie’s death.
Jenkins gave the blow-by-blow. He was a superb liar: “He had his back against the wall. I made a move and he fired at me, six feet away, right through the doorway.” He talked with his hands and eyes as much as with his words. “Goddamn, I’m lucky to be here. Sloan came in low, right under Biggie’s shot, and shot him twice. It was all so fast, not even Biggie knew the gun was empty. I mean, we’re talking Bam! Bam-Bam!”
Everybody bought that.
And why not? All the bullet holes were right there. Besides, the reconstruction of events suggested that Biggie’s .45 had killed three people and wounded three more, including Lucas.
SHRAKE’S DESCRIPTION OF Chase’s death had Chase pointing his weapon at the second woman’s face, ready to pull the trigger. The rescued woman was incoherent for two days after the shootings and kept talking about Chase rolling the other body’s eyes back and forth with his fingers.
Nobody wanted to know much more about Chase.
LUCAS TOLD THE absolute truth about Taylor and Grant, and blood analysis proved it.
Later analysis also indicated why the shootings weren’t more deadly than they were. O’Donnell’s guns, used by Biggie and Taylor, were loaded with target loads and cast slugs, apparently homemade by O’Donnell himself, for shooting close range at metal plates. They punched holes in the victims but didn’t expand, and most didn’t penetrate as deeply as combat loads would have. The third gun, a 9mm that did have combat loads, was used by Chase and had only had two or three rounds fired.
SLOAN, DURING ONE OF his visits, reconstructed Grant’s—or Rogers’s, or whoever he was—movements after O’Donnell disappeared. “He killed O’Donnell and dumped him, planted the evidence, and drove up to the airport and left the car where we’d find it,” Sloan said. “Then he took a shuttle back to Mankato and a cab back to his place, and went to work the next day. We know about the cab and shuttle for sure. That night, after work, he actually drove to Chicago, made the call to us, and drove back. The next day, he’s back at work again.”
“Risky . . . ,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. He took risks. And there’s no way to prove he drove to Chicago, but we checked the stewardesses, and nobody remembers him on a flight. Also, he had an oil change at a Jiffy Lube a week and a half ago and got a mileage sticker on his window. He’s driven almost two thousand miles in that time.”
“That’s good,” Lucas said. “You know, if he’d faked a suicide with O’Donnell . . . I don’t know that we ever would have broken it out. He got too complicated for himself.”
THE CRIME-SCENE PEOPLE believed that Angela Larson was killed in O’Donnell’s workshop; they found traces of blood, with indications that somebody had tried to clean it up with commercial liquid cleanser; the cleanser had actually ruined the blood for DNA analysis, but chemical analysis of the concrete dust on Larson’s feet matched the concrete of O’Donnell’s garage floor. O’Donnell, according to the security hospital records, was working the night that Larson was killed but was not working the night that Peterson was kidnapped. Was he involved? Lucas didn’t think so. He thought O’Donnell was probably Grant’s—or Rogers’s—last line of defense, and had been carefully set up.
THE BIGGEST, MOST complicated lie—if it was a lie, and many people would have denied that it was—appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune four days after the shootings, under the byline of Ruffe Ignace.
LIKE THIS:
The Twin Cities were saturated with media. Reporters were looking for explanations, going to funerals, interviewing people who didn’t know anything.
Rose Marie called Lucas and outlined the problem: “The media want a public execution. The legislature is behaving with its usual courage, so there’ll probably be one. The only candidates are the Department of Human Services, and us. Some of the DHS guys are semipublicly wondering why you were driving down there to pick up Grant? Why didn’t you call the sheriff and have him grabbed earlier in the day?”
They talked about it for an hour, and then Lucas called Ignace. Ignace came into the hospital on the evening of the day after the shooting, armed with six steno pads and half a dozen pens.
“We want to tell the truth before too many innocent people get hurt,” Lucas said piously.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s what I’m here for,” Ignace said.
“You gotta cover me,” Lucas said. “I’m not supposed to be talking. So . . . you’ve got multiple sources, okay?”
Ignace said, “That’s fine with me. I’ve already talked to a couple of people. I haven’t gotten much, but I can use them. So, saying I had multiple sources wouldn’t exactly be a lie.”
Not exactly.
LUCAS LED HIM THROUGH the chain of events, from the discovery of Pope’s body, to O’Donnell’s disappearance, to the call to the Cancun clinic, to the attack on Millie Lincoln and Mihovil, through the fight and the evacuations of the wounded to the various hospitals.
IGNACE TOOK a full day to write the story. It said, in part:
“. . . spent days looking for O’Donnell but couldn’t find him,” according to one investigator. “We decided we had to look at other staff members. We had the feeling that O’Donnell was another red herring, like Charlie Pope. We also decided that we couldn’t really trust the hospital personnel records, so we began researching the records on our own, vetting the staff members.”
A BCA researcher eventually contacted a clinic in Cancun, where, he was surprised to learn, Dr. Leopold Grant still worked. “That was the key,” said a source close to the investigation. “That’s when we knew we had identified the killer.”
Asked why they didn’t simply call the sheriff’s office and have “Roy Rogers” arrested at the hospital, the source said that “when O’Donnell disappeared, everybody thought he must be the killer. The Sheriff’s Department was involved in the search of O’Donnell’s house, and within a couple of hours, it seemed that everybody in Mankato knew we were looking for him. We didn’t know whether the Sheriff’s Department was leaking, or the hospital—but there was a big leak somewhere. When it came to Rogers, we didn’t want to take any chances. We knew he had at least two guns, taken from O’Donnell’s house, and we knew he was a complete madman. We wanted to take him down quickly, and secretly, without any warning. That’s why we did it the way we did, why we sent Davenport down with his team. These were all very experienced men, as we saw in the way they handled the firefight. And remember, we were only talking about an hour, not a long period of time. There was no long delay.”
Fatefully, when one of the researchers was looking into the “Leo Grant” personnel file, a direct call was made to the hospital. The research request was leaked inside the hospital, and apparently reached “Roy Rogers’s ” ears, who concluded correctly that he had been identified. He rushed from the hospital, back to his apartment, where the confrontation with Millie Lincoln and Mihovil took place, and the race to the hospital began.
ONE QUESTION POSED by Ignace and left out of the story when Lucas couldn’t answer it was “Why did O’Donnell take all of his money out of the bank the day he disappeared?”
Lucas shook his head. “We don’t know. We may never know.”
IGNACE IDENTIFIED LUCAS variously as a BCA official, an investigator, a state law-enforcement officer, a researcher, a source close to the investigation, a source who asked not to be identified, and a highly placed state official.
Because he actually named Rose Marie Roux, Carlton Aspen, the commissioner of the Department of Human Services, and Jerald Wald, the Senate majority leader, Ignace felt safe in saying that his sources included “police officers, state officials, legislators, and people directly involved in the firefight at St. John’s.”
ON THE EVENING THAT he finished the story, Ignace spent several hours on the Internet, checking apartment prices in Manhattan.
ROSE MARIE, ON READING the story the next morning, was pleased. “It might not be the truth, but it’s one truth, and best of all, its ours,” she said. She added, with some satisfaction, “The goddamn DHS is f*cked.”
THE MORNING AFTER he talked to Ignace, Lucas woke up, expecting to get out of the hospital, to find an exhausted and angry Weather sitting next to his bed.
“Wait’ll I get you home,” she said. Her eyes drifted toward a nurse.
“Where’s everybody else?” Lucas said.
“They’re still back in London. I didn’t have time to get everybody here. Lucas, we gotta talk. I’m your wife. You don’t get shot and don’t tell me about it . . .” Tears started down her face.
The nurse said, “Maybe I better take off for a while . . .”
LUCAS WENT HOME that day. His eye was blacker than it had ever been, but his nose was more or less straight. His arm was immobilized from shoulder to wrist. Two quarter-inch metal rods went straight through his skin from an outer brace: they would be there for a few days, and then another minor operation would take them out.
An orthopedic surgeon was checking out the brace when Weather came back from the bathroom. The doc recognized her and they chatted for a few seconds, and then Weather, with a certain tone in her voice, said to Lucas, “You see these rods going into your arm?”
Lucas looked down and said, “Yeah?”
“That’s what orthopods call ‘sutures.’ ”
THE MORNING AFTER THAT, he and Weather were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, reading Ignace’s story. Now that Lucas was ambulatory and she could see that his life wasn’t in danger, she was talking about getting back to the kids.
“Go ahead,” Lucas kept saying, “I’m really okay.”
His arm felt like a truck was sitting on it, and his face felt like somebody had driven a nail through his eye. He smiled and suppressed a wince.
“I feel like I’d be ditching you,” she said.
“No, no . . . I’m gonna be busier than hell.”
She started giving him more trouble about lying to her—although the night before, she’d settled most of his sexual problems, and any that he might have developed over the coming six or eight weeks.
Then the phone rang, and he snatched it up to get away from her eyes. Beloit, the doc from St. John’s, said, “I’ve got to talk with you. Privately. Secretly. May I come up?”
BELOIT CAME UP, and she and Weather sniffed each other’s credentials for a few minutes, then Weather went away and Beloit perched on a chair in the den and said, “I think I know why Sam withdrew money from the bank the day he disappeared.”
“I’d be interested,” Lucas said.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to hear it from me. I don’t want to testify. I’d lose my job and so would other people. But I need to get it off my chest . . .”
“So, we’ll call you a confidential source,” Lucas said. “If there’s no way to prove it, we’ll just pretend nobody said anything.”
She looked at him for a minute, then away, and finally her eyes came back: “We sort of had a social group in the hospital. The longhairs. We occasionally smoked a little dope.”
Ah. So that was it. He knew then what she was going to say but let her say it.
“Leo had the connection,” she said. “He knew the guy who brought it in from Canada. When the guy was coming by, he’d call Leo, but Leo didn’t have much money. So Sam would front the money, and he and Leo would go pick up a can of the stuff—it usually came in one of those big tobacco cans. Sam would parcel it around to the people in our group. We’d pay him our share, and he’d put the money back. He wasn’t making money on the deal, he was just . . . facilitating.”
“So Leo could have told him the guy was coming through . . .”
“And it was time. We’d been low, or out, for a while,” she said. “People had started asking when the guy from Canada was coming.”
“Okay. Would you happen to know the Canadian guy’s name?”
“Um, Manny,” Beloit said, with a tentative smile. “They used to call him Manny Sunshine.”
Lucas smiled. “It’s always Somebody Sunshine.”
“You can get this out, without my name?” she asked.
“I’ll have our dope guys look into Manny. If we can find him, we’ll have a talk. We don’t really want to bust a bunch of potheads. But it would be nice if we could explain the money withdrawal.”
“Please, please, keep my name out of it.”
“I will.” He liked her, even if she was a doper. He remembered seeing her kneeling over the woman in the cage, saving a life, as the shooting was going on around her.
“Do you think we’ll ever find Sam?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We shouldn’t have found Charlie Pope, but we did. So . . . I don’t know.”
THREE DAYS AFTER Lucas’s truth appeared in the Star-Tribune, DHS officials, seeing how the wind was blowing, decided to preempt any chance of higher-level hangings by doing a few of their own. Cale and four other administrators were put on administrative leave from the hospital. The word was, they’d never be back, and there might be more heads to roll.
Lucas, Jenkins, Shrake, Sloan, and the wildlife officer were given citations by their various departments, a signal that the departments had decided they were clean.
THE LEGISLATURE SCHEDULED hearings, and a group of Mankato residents demanded that a monument be built, with the names of the victims inscribed on it, in a plaza, or perhaps a new park. Rose Marie, reading the story, said to Lucas, “You know, it never occurred to me.”
“What?”
“That somebody might make a buck on this,” she said, as she turned the page.
A WEEK AFTER the shootings, Sloan was gone. He had a lot of accumulated vacation, which he took as a lead-in to actual retirement. His vacation check also helped on the down payment on the bar; he assumed ten years of a fifteen-year mortgage, renamed the place Shooters, and, his wife told Lucas, “The first person he hired is nineteen years old and has tits out to here.”
Lucas said, “Huh. He’s smarter than I thought.”
WEATHER CAME BACK from London with the kids and the housekeeper. The orthopod took the steel rods out of Lucas’s arm but left two titanium screws, which would be permanent. The arm ached, and the cast drove him crazy. He found he could scratch his arm with an ingeniously bent clothes hanger.
Letty, his ward, said, “You know, every time you scratch, there’s a bad smell.”
“Thank you. You do so much to help my self-confidence in social situations,” he said.
She was still teasing him when the phone rang. When Lucas picked it up, Nordwall told him that O’Donnell’s body had been found in the middle of a cornfield two miles from his home. The body was found by a farmer responding to his wife’s complaints of a persistent bad odor from across the road. O’Donnell had been shot once in the forehead.
“Grant, Rogers, whoever he was, must have been looking him right in the eyes when he pulled the trigger,” Nordwall said.
THEY NEVER FIGURED out who the killer was. He was buried under the name Roy Rogers, though nobody really thought that was his name. DNA records were kept in case anybody ever came looking for him.
AND FINALLY, a month after the shootings, deep in the bowels of the security hospital, nine patients and a doctor met for a group-therapy session. One of the patients, a man known for his silence, timorously raised a hand as soon as everybody had a chair.
Sennet, who was running the group, suppressed a look of surprise and said, “Lonnie? You have something for us?”
Lonnie, who feared many things—too many things, hundreds of them, a new one every minute—dug into his pocket and took out a tattered roll of yellow paper. “I found this the day everybody got shot. I didn’t steal it, it was lying in the hall.”
“Okay,” Sennet said, encouraging him. “What is it?”
Lonnie unrolled the paper. “It’s a list. It says, Best Songs of the Rock Era. It has a hundred songs on it.”
“May I see it?” Sennet asked.
“May I have it back?” Lonnie looked frightened, as though the list might be seized. “I think about it a lot.”
“Sure. If it’s only rock songs,” Sennet said.
Lonnie passed the paper round the circle of the group, each person glancing at it. When Sennet got it, he scanned the list, then passed it around the rest of the circle, and back to Lonnie.
“Do you have some thoughts about it?” Sennet asked.
“Well, these are the one hundred best rock songs, okay?”
“Okay.”
Lonnie’s lip trembled. “But, there are no Beatles on the list. Don’t you see? There are no Beatles . . .”