"No, no, uh, just a minute."
Most people involved in tragedies want to talk, Ignace had found, if only you could get through to them. He waited ten seconds, and then had Laurina on the line: "Laurina: I'm terribly sorry about Adam and Josh…"
"Oh, my God, oh, my God, they wouldn't even let me see them…"
"Do they know when it happened?" Ignace asked.
"They think yesterday…uh, who is this?"
"Ruffe Ignace from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. We're alerting people around the state that we have this monster loose…"
"He is! He is! He's a monster."
She began sobbing and Ignace noted in Gregg, "Weeping, sobbing, disconsolate…"
"People tell me that Adam and Josh were wonderful people, no bother to anyone," Ignace said. "They can't figure out who would do this. Do the police think anyone he knows…?"
"No, they told me this man is a monster, that he killed a woman in the Twin Cities…"
"A beautiful young girl named Angela Larson from Chicago," Ignace said. "She was just trying to work her way through college."
"Oh, God. And with Adam, after the tragedy last year…"
"Tragedy? The police didn't tell me about a tragedy." A disapproving tone, as though secrets had been withheld.
"His wife was killed in an awful, awful accident," Rice said. "Adam was a widower and poor little Josh lost his mother…"
"Did little Josh ever talk to you about her?"
"You know, just last Christmas, he said that he would give up every gift he had if he could have Mommy back. He was so sweet, and smart! He was my only grandchild, I'll never have a grandchild now."
She was rolling. Once you got an interviewee rolling, you tried not to interrupt. With an occasional prompt, or short sympathetic question, Ignace had pumped her dry in twenty minutes. He even had the detail about the tire swing hanging from the oak tree out on the lawn.
"But they didn't let you see them…"
"Only their faces. The sheriff told me I didn't want to, but they came out with him in that black bag and I marched right up and I said, 'I want to see my grandson! I wouldn't take 'No.' So they unzipped it and let me look at his face…"
"What did you think when you saw his face? What was your reaction?"
"Oh my God…" The bawling started again, and Ignace took it down in Gregg…
HE WAS BUZZING when he hung up, Ruffe's Radio: There you go, Ooo, the thing about Ignace is, he's smarter than any reporter in the Twin Cities. You know he used to be an Olympic acrobat… Wait, do they have acrobats in the Olympics? Maybe it's gymnastics. Some hot chick with the big boobs on ESPN: Tell me, Lord Ignace, how does it feel to be knighted by the queen…?
He was buzzing because he had the story. Whatever else might happen, he had the basic facts, he had the color. He didn't even need the cops, but he'd have to call them anyway. Because Sloan thought he was asshole, and Hubbard had warned him away from Davenport, he started with the sheriff.
Nordwall didn't want to talk, but Ignace said, "First of all, Sheriff, this is public record, the basic facts. You really do have an obligation to warn people about this guy.?
That got him the basics. Then he said, "The stuff that I got from the survivors, let me just give it to you quick, just to make sure there isn't anything terribly wrong. I want this to be accurate-you don't even have to tell me anything else, but just if this is right."
He then gave Nordwall everything that Hubbard had given him, plus everything that Laurina Rice had given to him, plus some bullshit that he made up. That got the sheriff rolling, and when they were done, he had a front-page story nailed down.
He talked to his team leader, who in olden says would have been called an assistant city editor, and she talked to the metro editor, and then the team leader came back and told him they would take everything he had, don't worry about length.
A photographer was dispatched to Mankato to get a shot of an empty tire swing, and a graphics artist starting pulling up Internet images of straight razors. Ignace spread his notes over his desk, marked some of them with a red felt-tip.
Hubbard: he owed him. No question about it.
HE COULDN'T FIND SLOAN. He had stolen an internal police department phone book, with home phone numbers for all the cops, but nobody answered when he called Sloan's home. He left a message with the answering service, said briefly what he wanted, and hung up. He toyed with the idea of calling Davenport, thought about Hubbard's warning, and decided against it.
Besides, there was an old newspaper maxim that he was happy to honor: too many facts could ruin a perfectly good story. Nobody could complain that he hadn't done the work-he'd talked to the principal law-enforcement officer of the county where the murder happened, he had talked earlier in the week to Sloan about the Angela Larson murder, he had comments from survivors. He didn't need Davenport.
He settled in behind his computer, webbed his fingers together, cracked his knuckles, and started typing.
A serial killer is loose in Minnesota, a sexual predator armed with a razor, a man who tortures his victims before raping them, male and female alike, and cutting their throats…
Another reporter passed by Ignace's cubicle as he passed a thousand words, and thought, Jesus: the guy really does buzz.
AND WHILE IGNACE WAS BUZZING, Millie Lincoln was…Well.
MILLIE LINCOLN WAS SHORT and blond and liked men; always had. She liked her father, she liked her uncles, she liked all four of her brothers, and they liked her back.
Men liked her back.
Millie gave up her virginity when she was sixteen, fumbling around in her boyfriend's parents' bed.By twenty-two, she'd had four addi-tional lovers. She spent her senior year to high school with the second one, after the fumbler, and then messed around with a college kid, an affair begun with another freshman during the first long Mankato winter, then got into a more serious thing that lasted almost two years.
Then, finally, Mihovil Draskovic.
MIHOVIL WAS SEVEN YEARS OLDER than she. A strong, ropy man, slightly mysterious; and a doctor.
Mihovil had made his way from his native Serbia to the United States as a fifteen-year-old, had enlisted in the marines when he was seventeen, became a medic, got out of the crotch, as he called it, went to med school on a marine corps scholarship. He had marine tattoos and now wore his hair long and loose over his wide shoulders, like Jesus. He always had a smile on his face, he was a man perpetually amused, a man with Gypsy eyes…a man of slightly fractured English, a crazy mixture of broken grammar and cutting-edge slang.
Mihovil had spent much of his young life in a refugee camp, where the children slept on one side of the hovel and the parents made love behind an army blanket that hung from the ceiling. Since they didn't have a TV, they were behind the blanket almost every night, and the activity was almost uncommented-upon. Natural.
Mihovil and Millie met in the Mankato hospital emergency room. Millie had dislocated a finger playing football, and he'd popped it back in place. They'd talked a little before and after, had bumped into each other in the bagel place a couple of days later, and one thing led to another…
Led to another all over the place.
Inside, outside, on hospital beds, floors, lawns, under apple trees; standing up, lying down, now one on top, now the other.
Mihovil taught her to say things like "Wait. Do this-here, move your head right over here and now lick slower and shorter…Oh, my God, that's almost right. Wiggle your finger down… Oh, my God…"
He'd gone into instructional mode the second time they slept together. Why was she moving around aimlessly, he wanted to know. Why didn't she have an orgasm and beat her feet on the sheets? Why was she treating his dick like a shovel handle?
He was nice enough about it, but blunt. She didn't think it was a language barrier; he was just a blunt guy.