A car in front of them suddenly slowed for a left turn, and Lucas swung around it, a quick brake and a quicker acceleration. Then he looked at Sloan: “How the fuck can you talk about quitting when you pull off something like this?”
“For all the good it did Louise Samples or anybody else,” Sloan said.
“Man, you gotta take a couple of aspirin and lie down,” Lucas said. “I’m really startin’ to think you’re losing it.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you, dickweed,” Sloan said. He looked out the window as they crossed the river: “When I get my bar, I’ll want your list of songs. I’ll put them on the jukebox.”
“No Beatles.”
“No Beatles. But how about a couple of Tom Joneses? ‘Green Green Grass’ or something.”
“Sloan-you gotta get help.”
9
Just off the southwest corner of the metro area, Lucas called his secretary and was told that he had two dozen phone messages, one each from Rose Marie Roux, the commissioner of public safety; from John McCord, the superintendent of the BCA; and from Neil Mitford, the governor’s top political operator. The rest came from various members of the media asking for interviews and updates.
He answered the first three immediately: all three wanted updates, and he gave them a quick recap of the trip to St. John’s.
To McCord: “I got an address for a schizophrenic guy, a Mike West, that we need to talk to. He’s an old pal of Pope’s.”
“Shrake and Jenkins are sitting on their asses; I could send them,” McCord said.
“Okay, but for Christ’s sake, tell them to take it easy.”
“We got a charge?”
“Just hold him for questioning; have them bring him in, we’ll get him a public defender if we need to, and see if we can work something out,” Lucas said. “But if we do find him just sitting around, then maybe he’s clear. If he’s gone, if he’s skipped, that’d be a little more interesting.”
“I’ll send them over,” McCord said.
“Tell them to leave their goddamn saps in their car, okay?”
“I don’t know about any saps,” McCord said. “Saps would be against policy.”
“Then tell them to follow policy.”
“All right. If you need anything else, let me know.”
“Mitford and Rose Marie called, and I told them I’d be doing another press conference this afternoon,” Lucas said. “Same deal as yesterday, except we’ve probably made Pope for another murder.”
He explained, briefly, and McCord said, “Put Sloan in the press conference. Spread the publicity around. We’ll make some points with Minneapolis.”
The publicity cut two ways: by putting Sloan out front, some of the glory was reflected onto the Minneapolis police department; and if they didn’t catch Pope fairly quickly, some of the blame, as well.
“Press conferences are like fuckin’ the neighbor lady,” Sloan said, as he dialed up his own chief after Lucas finished with McCord. “Feels good at the time, but you’re gonna have to pay in the end.”
They got back at three-forty-five and went to Lucas’s office, where Carol had piled up everything that had come in from Albert Lea and the Freeborn County sheriff on the Louise Samples killing. They read through it, looked at everything else they had on Pope, and then walked down to the conference room.
The press conference itself was the same routine: scraping chairs, posturing TV people. Ruffe Ignace was in the front row, but his story that morning had been anticipated by the TV news the night before. He was now behind in the cycle, had lost his edge, and wasn’t happy: he snapped questions out at Lucas, thrashing around, looking for something, anything. Lucas was polite.
Lucas described how Sloan picked up on the Samples killing, outlined what had happened, and what they believed. The Albert Lea cops were going through the retained evidence from the case, he said, looking for anything that might have a dab of Pope’s DNA on it. When he finished, the reporters gave Sloan an only moderately sarcastic round of applause. That was a first, ever.
Sloan said, “It really was nothing much,” but Lucas said, “It was amazing.”
When they were finished, they headed back to Lucas’s office. Halfway back, they bumped into Shrake and Jenkins, the BCA’s designated thugs, who’d been sent to Mike West’s designated halfway house to pick him up.
Jenkins was a square man who smoked too much; Shrake was tall and thin, and smoked more than Jenkins. They both wore sharp, shiny European-cut suits that had fallen off a truck somewhere; Shrake referred to them as quasi-Armanis.
“Fuckin’ waste of time,” Jenkins said. He habitually walked around with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, so all his jackets had stretched-out pockets. “The guy’s been gone for a month. We talked to the administrator over there. He said West’s meds were fogging him up so bad that he couldn’t stand them. The house rules are that you have to take your meds-and since he couldn’t stand doing that, he took off.”
“Any idea where he might be?”
“Doc says he’s probably on the street. His parents live in Arizona-they’re retired. We could check with the Scottsdale cops.”
“Do that,” Lucas said. “See if they could have somebody stop by. And get a bulletin out to the local uniforms, get them to poke around. We really would like to talk to him.”
At Lucas’s office, they found a note from Caroclass="underline" “Dr. Grant called from St. John’s and asked that you call him back. He’s on his cell phone.”
“Grant was the shrink,” Sloan said.
Lucas called him, and Grant answered on the third ring: “Listen, I don’t know if you’re interested, but I pulled out all my session tapes on Pope,” he said. “There’re five or six hours of material. Most of it was just talk. How was he feeling, what was he doing. But there’s an hour or so when he’s talking about getting out, what he’ll do, about the women he attacked. I edited down to the good stuff, an hour or so.”
“I need that,” Lucas said. “Can you messenger it up?”
“I’m coming up there tonight. If you want to tell somebody that I’m coming, I could drop it at the BCA office. . it’s just a regular cassette tape.”
“Where’re you going in the Cities?”
“Downtown Minneapolis.”
“Why don’t you drop it at my house? That’ll save you a half hour, and it’s easy to find.”
Lucas went home, ate a steak-and-onions low-carb, low-fat, low-protein microwave meal that had apparently been made purely from coal tars and goobers, perhaps seasoned with industrial phlegm; watched the television news; thought his suit looked pretty good but that his face looked too harsh-maybe from the diet? He looked at himself in the mirror, wondered if he should use a moisturizer-Weather’s solution for anything that didn’t involve bleeding or broken bones-but was embarrassed by the thought and eventually went out to the garage.
When Grant showed up, a few minutes before eight o’clock, Lucas was lying in the driveway, his head under the ass end of his Lexus, trying to rewire the trailer harness. The harness hung in an exposed position and had gotten trashed while he was dragging a boat around Wisconsin. More fine auto design.
“You under there? Lucas?”
“Yeah.” Lucas turned his head, saw a pair of cordovan loafers, and pushed himself out. “Just a minute. I almost got it.”
He didn’t, though. After fooling with the inadequate male-female connection for a moment, he decided he’d have to readjust the wiring distance between a support bracket and the connection. That would take more light than he had. He pushed himself out again and got to his feet.
“How’s it going?” Lucas hadn’t paid special attention to Grant at St. John’s, but now he looked him over. He was about Lucas’s height, but maybe fifteen pounds lighter, with edges. He didn’t look like he worked out, but there was a feral toughness about him.