“I want to talk to them, the thirty-four people,” Lucas said. “All at once. In a group. Get the union guy in here too.”
“For what?” Wullfolk asked.
“I’ll tell them that I want to know what happened to the gun, and the guy that tells me, I won’t turn him in. And that the chief will call off the IAD investigation and nothing more’ll happen. I’m going to tell them that if nobody talks to me, we’ll go ahead with the shoo-flies and sooner or later we’ll find out who it is and then we’ll prosecute the son of a bitch on accessory-to-murder and throw his ass in Stillwater.”
Anderson shook his head. “I wouldn’t buy it, if I was the guy.”
“You got a convincer?” asked Daniel.
Lucas nodded. “I think so. I’ll outline how the interrogation will go and I’ll tell them that I won’t read them their rights or anything else, so even if they are prosecuted, the whole thing would be entrapment and the case would be thrown out. I think we could build it so the guy would buy it.”
Anderson and Daniel looked at each other, and Anderson shrugged. “It’s worth a try. It could get us something fast. I’ll set something up for late afternoon. Try to get as many as I can. Four o’clock?”
“Good,” Lucas said.
“We’ve set up a data base in my office, we got a girl typing everything in and printing it out. Everybody working it gets a notebook with every piece of paper we develop, every interview,” Anderson said. “We’ll go over everything we know about these people. If there’s a connection or a pattern, we’ll find it. Everybody’s supposed to read the files every night. When you see something, tell me. We’ll put it in the file.”
“What do we have so far?” asked Lucas.
Anderson shook his head. “Not much. Personal data, some loose patterns, that sorta shit. Number one was Lucy Bell, a waitress, nineteen years old. Number two was a housewife, Shirley Morris, thirty-six. Number three was the artist that fought him off, Carla Ruiz. She’s thirty-two. Number four was this real-estate woman Lewis, forty-six. One was married, the other three were not. One of the other three, the artist, is divorced. The real-estate woman was a widow. The waitress was a rock-’n’-roller, a punk. The real-estate lady went to classical-music concerts with her boyfriend. It goes like that. The only pattern seems to be that they’re all women.”
Everybody thought about it for a minute.
“What’s the interval between murders?” asked Lucas.
“The first one, Bell, was July 14, then Morris was on August 2, nineteen days between them; then the next was Ruiz on August 17, fifteen days after Morris; then Lewis on August 31, fourteen days later,” said Anderson.
“Getting shorter,” said one of the cops.
“Yeah. That’s a tendency with sadistic killers, if he is one,” said Wullfolk.
“If they start coming faster, he’ll be doing them off the top of his head, not so careful-like,” said another of the cops.
“We don’t know that. He may be picking them out six months ahead of time. He may have a whole file of them,” Anderson said.
“Any other pattern to the days?” asked Lucas.
“That’s one thing, they’re all during the week. A Thursday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, and another Wednesday. No weekends.”
“Not much of a pattern,” Daniel said.
“Anything about the women?” asked Lucas. “All tall? All got big tits? What?”
“They’re all good-looking. That’s my judgment, but I think it’s right. All have dark hair, three of them black—the Bell girl, who dyed hers black, Ruiz, and Lewis. Morris’ hair was dark brown.”
“Huh. Half the women in town have blonde hair, or blondish,” said one of the other detectives. “That might be something.”
“There are all kinds of possibilities in this stuff, but we gotta be careful, because there’s also coincidence to think about. Anyway, look for those patterns. I’ll make a special list of patterns,” Anderson said. “Bring in your notebooks every afternoon and I’ll give you updates. Read them.”
“What about the lab, they sittin’ on their thumbs, or what?” asked Wullfolk.
“They’re doing everything they can. They’re running down the tape he used to bind them, they’re sifting through the crap they picked up with the vacuum, they’re looking at everything for prints. They haven’t come up with much.”
“If any of these notebooks get to the media, there are going to be some bodies twisting in the wind,” said Daniel. “Everybody understand?”
The cops all nodded at once.
“I don’t doubt that we’re going to spring some leaks,” Daniel said. “But nobody, nobody is to say anything about the notes the killer is leaving behind. If I find somebody leaks to the media on these notes, I’ll find the son of a bitch and fire him. We’ve been holding it close to our chests, and it’s going to stay that way.”
“We need a surefire identifier that the public doesn’t know about,” Anderson explained. “They knew they had the Son of Sam when they looked through the window of his apartment and saw some notes like the ones he’d been sending to the cops and the media.”
“There’s going to be a lot of pressure,” Daniel said. “On all of us. I’ll try to keep it off your backs, but if this asshole gets one or two more, there’ll be reporters who want to talk to the individual detectives. We’re going to put that off as long as we can. If we get to the point where we’ve got to do it, we’ll get the attorney in to advise you on what to say and what not to say. Every interview gets cleared through this office in advance. Okay? Everybody understand?”
The heads bobbed again.
“Okay. Let’s do it,” he said. “Lucas, hang around a minute.”
When the rest of the cops had shuffled out, Daniel pushed the door shut.
“You’re our pipeline to the media, feeding out the unofficial stuff we need in the papers. You drop what we need on one of the papers and maybe one TV station as a deep source, and when the others come in for confirmation, I’ll catch that. Okay?”
“Yeah. I’m a source for people at both papers and all the TV stations. The biggest problem will be keeping them from figuring out I’m sourcing all of them.”
“So work something out. You’re good at working things out. But we need the back door into the media. It’s the only way they’ll believe us.”
“I’d just as soon not lie to anybody,” Lucas said.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But if you gotta burn somebody, you burn him. This is too heavy to fool around with.”
“Okay.”
“You got an interview with that artist?”
“Yeah. This afternoon.” Lucas looked at his watch. “I’ve got to close down my net and get back here by four. I better get moving.”
Daniel nodded. “I got a real bad feeling about this one. Homicide won’t catch the guy unless we get real lucky. I’m looking for help, Davenport. Find this son of a bitch.”
Lucas spent the rest of the morning on the street, moving from bars to pay phones to newsstands and barbershops. He talked to a half-dozen dope dealers ranging in age from fourteen to sixty-four, and three of their customers. He spoke to two bookies and an elderly couple who ran a convenience mail drop and an illegal switchboard, several security guards, one crooked cop, a Sioux warrior, and a wino who, he suspected, had killed two people who deserved it. The message was the same for all of them: I will be gone, but, I trust, not forgotten, because I will be back.
Freezing the net worried him. He thought of his street people as a garden that needed constant cultivation—money, threats, immunity, even friendship—lest the weeds of temptation begin to sprout.
At noon Lucas called Anderson and was told that the meeting had been set.
“Four o’clock?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll see you before that. Talk it over.”
“Okay.”
He ate lunch at a McDonald’s on University Avenue, sharing it with a junkie who nodded and nodded and finally fell asleep in his french fries. Lucas left him slumped over the table. The pimple-faced teenager behind the counter watched the bum with the half-hung eyes of a sixteen-year-old who had already seen everything and was willing to leave it alone.