“Can you. .”
“I can’t fuckin’ anything,” Lighter said, eyes snapping over to Lucas. “Get the fuck away from me. I want a lawyer.” Back to Sloan: “I’d like an hour with you.”
Sloan stepped close to the glass: “I wish I could give it to you. I wish I could get one fuckin’ minute alone with you. I’d put a fuckin’ bullet right in your fuckin’ brain, and then I’d spit on your fuckin’ body.”
Lighter recoiled, looked at Hart: “He can’t talk to me like that. I want a fuckin’ lawyer. .”
“Ah, for Christ’s sake,” Hart said.
Lucas: “Let’s go. We’re done.”
As they got to the outer door, Hart slowed and looked back down the hall and said, “Goddamnit.”
“What?”
“They call them the Big Three. You didn’t even talk to Chase-but Charlie did.”
Lucas looked back down the halclass="underline" the glass slapping continued and Taylor was still screaming, but the screams had gone incoherent and his voice was beginning to break. They sounded, Lucas thought, not unlike what happens when a kid throws a rock in a monkey cage. “Two minutes,” Lucas said, stepping back down the hall. “Let’s give him two minutes.”
Lawrence W. Chase was so thin he might be anorexic. His cheek bones pushed through his skin, his hands trembled. “Don’t call me Larry, ’cause that’s not my name. My name is Lawrence.”
Sloan: “Okay, Lawrence.”
Chase said through the open glass, “You gotta get me out of here.”
“Can’t do that,” Sloan said.
And Chase started to weep as he stood in front of the window. “I can’t stay here. I ask them to put me at Stillwater, but they won’t do it. I ask them to let me work, but they won’t do that, either. I ask them to kill me, and they say they can’t. They won’t even let me kill myself. There are cameras in my room.”
Hart said, “We don’t want you to hurt yourself, Lawrence. Maybe you’ll get better.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me, except that I’m in here.”
“You killed nine people, Lawrence,” Hart said. “Nine that we know of. You hunted them down and shot them.”
“They were. . I was being. . Paleolithic. I was just. .”
“Lawrence. .”
“I don’t want to argue,” he whimpered. “I just want you to kill me clean.” To Lucas: “I haven’t seen the sky in two years.”
“Shouldn’t have killed those people.”
“I had to; don’t you see? You get out there, the Paleolithic rises up in you. Man is a hunter. I hunted. You must know that-you’re a cop. You hunt people.”
Lucas had to look away: “If you can help us, maybe you could look out the window.”
A sly look crossed over Chase’s face: “Biggie said he was going to get extra desserts all week. Could I look out the window and get extra desserts?”
Hart nodded. “But that’s all. We’ll take you down tomorrow where you can see out.”
Chase started to weep again. His eyes reddened as the tears leaked out, and against his pale skin they looked like the eyes on a white rabbit, all pink and shot through with blood. He finally wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands and said, “I don’t know what I can tell you, but I’ll help if I can.”
“Did you talk to Charlie Pope about kidnapping women? About keeping them?” Lucas asked.
And suddenly, everything about Chase seemed to tighten, and his face flooded with color. “I told him what they said I done. I didn’t ask him to do it.”
“What do you think about it. . what he’s doing?”
“Taylor says he’s doing the Lord’s work.”
“But Taylor’s full of shit,” Lucas snapped. “What we want to know is this: Did you talk to Pope specifically about what you did? Exactly what you did? The details? Or did you just talk. .”
“He pretty much knew all about it,” Chase said. “That kind of thing comes out. They say if you don’t get it out in the open, you can’t deal with it. That’s what they say. I don’t remember what they said I did. .” He scratched his head and then began leaking tears again. “I gotta get out of here.”
“Did you tell him how to hide out? Do you have any idea where he might go? What he was thinking about?”
“No. He wanted to get a job in meatpacking. He said there was good money in it. He said he almost got a job at Hormel, but they turned him down because some old bitch didn’t like him.” His lips picked up a little curl, not quite a smile, something with a sneer in it. “I bet she. .”
Then, just as quickly, the expression flicked away. “But where he went, I don’t know. He never seemed to think about it too much. He just wanted to get out. He was desperate. They used to let him look out the window, though. He could see the driveway and people coming and going.”
“Did he talk about razors? Did he talk about whipping women? Did he talk about hunting them?” Lucas asked.
“He didn’t talk about it so much.” Chase started squirming, wrapping his ankles together, like he had to pee, and again, Lucas had to look away. “But he listened to it. He liked to hear about it.”
“I think you might be projecting, Lawrence,” Hart said.
“I’m not projecting,” Chase said. “He used to listen real close.”
They talked for a few more minutes, but Chase had nothing more. Lucas finally shrugged and said to Hart, “Let’s go.”
They stepped away, and then Sloan stepped back to the window and asked, “Hey, Larry. . what’d Charlie Pope do to the woman from Hormel?”
Chase turned at the “Larry,” to protest-but when the question got to him, he tried to rearrange his face into an expression of puzzlement, like a child trying to come up with another reason why his hand was in the cookie jar.
“Why. . why. .”
“What was her name, Larry?” Sloan asked lazily. “I mean, we’re gonna find out. If you don’t tell us, they could give you another twenty years for being an accomplice after the fact. You’d never see the sun.”
“I didn’t have nothing to do with it, I don’t know. .”
“Larry, what the fuck was her name?” Sloan asked. A little steel now.
Chase looked into himself for a moment, and Sloan said, “Lawrence?” and tears came to Chase’s eyes again and he sobbed, then said, “I don’t know, but her first name might have been Louise.”
“When was this?”
Chase couldn’t look at them. “Maybe, maybe in ninety-five.”
“Sonofabitch,” Hart said, peering at Sloan. “Did he just tell you what I think he did? Did you just solve a murder?”
Hart walked them briskly back through the hospital to the administrator’s office and told Ross, “We had something come up with Chase.”
He explained in a few words, and Ross said to Sloan, “My assistant has all those numbers. Would you like her to call around down there? We could probably get you something before you’re back home.”
“Sure,” Lucas said. “And we need an address for this Mike West guy, the guy Pope used to hang with.”
They got the address, and on the way out, the administrator said to Sloan, “This thing you did with Chase. . You have a nice talent. Maybe you should have been a psychologist.”
Sloan almost blushed. “Ah, it might all be bullshit.”
It wasn’t.
Ross called back when they were halfway to Minneapolis. Sloan took the call on his cell phone, listened for a minute, and then said, “Let me take that down.” He took a pad and a mechanical pencil from his coat pocket, jotted down a name and number.
“Could you call him back? Tell him I’ll get in touch in an hour or so-when I’m back in the office. Okay.”
He punched off and said to Lucas, “A woman named Louise Samples, who worked in personnel at Hormel in the city of Albert Lea, was killed in her house in November of ninety-five. The cops say it looked like she walked in on a burglar. He hit her with a hammer and then raped her at least a couple of times, once anally. She was probably dead for most of it. They never got a break on the case.”