“Fuck ’em. I got another stop to make. Five o’clock-maybe we can change it to four o’clock on other days.”
“If you gotta-I’ll pass the complaints along to Carol. She’s probably gotten some calls already.”
“About a million of them.”
“So-handle it.”
Lucas called Carol back, told her to set up the press conference and to call Nordwall and invite him to make a statement. “He might want to get his picture on TV. He’s running this fall.”
Fox led them back to the I-35 connection, waved good-bye out the window, and Lucas spun down the ramp and they headed back north. “Sorta like the old days when we were operating in Minneapolis,” Sloan said. “The old days were sorta fucked up, you know? Looking back?”
“You’re just getting cranky,” Lucas said. “What could be better than chasing assholes like Pope? Think of all the guys who never get to do anything. You can’t sit on your ass until you die.”
Sloan cleared his throat. “I’d thought maybe. . I’d buy a bar.”
Lucas looked at him for ten seconds, then said, “You’re kidding me.”
“I’m not kidding. I’ve been looking into it. Seriously,” Sloan said.
“When did this come up?” Lucas asked. “You don’t know anything about running a bar. That’s a complicated business.”
“Hey, I took a small-business class last semester at the community college,” Sloan said. “The situation I’m looking at, it’s not a big deal. The owner’s getting old, wants to retire, but he’d work with me as long as it took. You know Bernie Berger. .”
“The Pine place? Out by Golden Valley?”
“Yeah. Don’t piss on it; it’s not that bad a place.”
“I wasn’t gonna piss on it. It is a likeable place. Other than the fact that it’s called the Pine Knot. But even if you got a deal, you’re a cop, Sloan. .”
“I’m tired,” Sloan said.
“Ah, for Christ’s sake.” Lucas took his hands off the wheel and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “If you quit. . who’s gonna chase the assholes with me?”
The next city north was Faribault. The Rockyard was just outside the city limits on a county frontage road that ran parallel to the interstate. A yellow sign that said TOPLESS faced the highway, a beacon to truck drivers, but the paint was coming off the sign and it might not have been current. The bar itself had a gravel parking lot, fake yellow-log siding with a simulated hitching post, and a wooden boardwalk. A barbeque sign flicked an orange BBQ-BBQ-BBQ out toward the county road, and a Coors sign said COORS-COORS-COORS.
Four pickups sat in the parking lot, with an Oldsmobile with hand-sized rust spots down the sides and across the trunk. The Olds’s license plate hung off the bumper on wire loops.
“Good-looking place,” Sloan said, as they got out of the Porsche.
“Ah, if I were seventeen. .”
“And stupid. .”
The saloon was cool inside, smelling of beer and fried hamburger. A woman bartender in a white blouse, black vest, and ribbon tie was wiping down the bar. A couple of guys were shooting pool in the back, nine ball, and three more watching, all of them with longnecks in their hands. Everybody turned their heads when Lucas and Sloan stepped inside. Sloan muttered, looking at the bartender, “That doesn’t look like a Booger.”
“C’mon,” Lucas said; he’d been checking faces in the back.
They went on to the bar, and the bartender asked, “Gentlemen? What can I do you for?” She was a sturdy dark-haired woman, about fifty, with too-red lipstick and too much rouge. A cigarette was burning in an ashtray next to the cash register.
“Carl around?” Lucas asked.
“Can I tell him who’s calling?”
“Yeah, the cops,” Lucas said. He held out his ID. “We need a little help.”
She looked at Lucas, then at Sloan, and asked, “Is he in trouble?”
“Can’t tell yet,” Lucas said.
“I’ll see if I can find him,” she said. She walked down behind the bar and out, and into a back room. The pool watchers were now all watching Lucas and Sloan, and Lucas smiled at them. Ten seconds later, the bartender reappeared. A fat man, with hair like a haystack, and who might have described himself as muscular, shambled along behind.
“Hi, I’m Carl,” he said. “You’re police officers? Is there a problem?”
“You know a guy named Adam Rice?” Lucas asked.
Carl blinked rapidly, then said, “Jesus. He was the guy. We weren’t sure.”
“Yeah, he was,” Lucas said. Everybody in the bar was listening now. “You gotta place where we can go talk?”
Carl had a small office, a cherry-laminate desk with a swivel chair, and two formed-plastic chairs for visitors. The desk was piled with paper, a well-used desk calculator to one side. Carl leaned back in the chair, which squealed under the load, and said, “I know the guy. He’d come in, have a few beers, cry a little, listen to music. He was a sad guy. How’d you know he came in here?”
“Heck, everybody’s been calling us,” Sloan said. “You ever see him with a guy. .”
Carl’s eyes got thin: “The way you said that-you mean, a gay guy?”
“Yeah.”
Carl snorted and leaned farther back in the chair. “A gay guy would not come in here. Or if he did, he’d sure as shit not let anybody know he was gay. I only saw Rice talking with a couple of guys, and then it was just random guy-shit, sitting at the bar, drinking beer.”
“What about the girls?” Lucas asked.
Carl’s eyes involuntarily wandered. “He’d come in alone. .,” he began.
“Don’t bullshit us, Booger,” Lucas said, scuffing his chair an inch toward the fat man. “We know about the girls, we know you introduced them. We need your help, and we’re gonna get it one way or another. Now. . was there one girl, or more than one? And where could we find them?”
After a moment of silence, Carl said, “They’re gonna give me a ton of shit about this.”
“We’re talking about a serial torture killer. If there’s any hint that he somehow met Rice here, through the girls, they’d want to know about it,” Lucas said.
Carl sighed, put his hands over his belly, twiddled, then said, “He’d try to get Dove, a blondie. If she was busy, he’d take one or the other. But he’d usually ask if anybody had seen Dove.”
“But he hooked up with some of the others, too.”
“Yeah, he did,” Carl said. “They’d go over next door, the girls got rooms. He’d get his blow job, and he’d come back here all weepy, have another beer, and then go on home.”
“How often?” Sloan asked.
“Twice a week, maybe,” Carl said.
“How much?”
“For a blow job? Fifty if you wear a rubber, or seventy without,” Carl said. “The extra twenty is, like, AIDS insurance.”
“That’s a good idea,” Sloan said. “Nothin’ like AIDS insurance.”
“Hey, it’s not me, the girls don’t work for me,” Carl protested. “They come in here, but what am I gonna do? I’m not a cop. I’m not their guardian. They don’t do any business on the premises, and some of the guys. . like to have them around.”
Lucas: “Their names are Dove and. .?”
“Andi and Aix, right now. The one girl’s name is pronounced X, but it’s spelled A-I–X, as she’ll tell you every chance she gets. She thinks she’s speaking French because she once went there with her boyfriend. There were a couple more girls, but they moved away, I couldn’t tell you where. They come and they go.”
“Dove is still here?”
“Should be right next door, unless they’re shopping.” He looked at his watch. “Mornings, lots of times, they run up to the Mall of America, but they’re usually back by two-guys get off work a couple hours early, they like to stop by for an afternooner. You know, before supper.”
“Wouldn’t want a blow job on a full stomach,” Sloan said.
“What rooms?” Lucas asked.
“Usually twenty-three, twenty-five, and twenty-seven, down at the end of the hall. Close enough that they can scream for help.”
“They ever scream for help?” Sloan asked.
“Not lately, but who knows?”
“We may come back and talk to you some more,” Lucas said, standing up. “Don’t call the girls, huh?”