And got an answering machine. “Leave a message,” Davenport’s voice said tersely, without identifying itself. There was a beep. The maddog was disappointed. It was not the same as human contact. He touched his tongue to the spot of blood on the back of his hand, savored it, then said, “I did another one.”
The line stayed open and he wet his lips.
“It was lovely,” he said.
CHAPTER
19
“It was lovely.”
Lucas listened a second time, the despair growing in his chest.
“Motherfucker,” he whispered.
He ran the tape back and played it again.
“It was lovely.”
“Motherfucker.” He sank down beside the desk, put his elbow on it, propped his forehead up with his hand. He sat for three minutes, unable to think. The house huddled around him, dim, protective, quiet. A car rolled by in the street, its lights tracking across the wall. Rousing himself, he called Minneapolis and asked for the watch commander.
“Nothing here,” he was told. St. Paul said the same. Nothing in Bloomington. There were too many suburbs to check them all. And Lucas thought it likely that the maddog had killed one in Lucas’ own jurisdiction. It was a contest now. Explicitly.
“Lucas?” Daniel’s voice had an ugly edge to it.
“I got a call. He’s says he’s done another one.”
“Sweet bleedin’ Jesus,” Daniel said. In the background Lucas heard Daniel’s wife ask if there had been another one, and where.
“I don’t know where,” Lucas said. “He didn’t tell me. He just said it was lovely.”
They found the law student two days later, in the late afternoon. She rarely missed class. When she was gone the first day, her absence was noted, but not investigated. When she missed the second day with no word from her, no excuse, a friend called her apartment but got no answer. At dinnertime the friend stopped and saw the light in the back. She knocked, peered through the window, saw a rubber grip handle of the wheelchair protruding from the bedroom doorway. Worried, she went to the old woman, who brought her keys. Together they found the Chosen.
“I was afraid the maddog had killed her,” the friend wept when the first cops arrived. “I thought of it on the way over. What if the maddog’s taken her?”
“Red Horse?”
“Annie, there’s another one,” Lucas said. He gave her the name and address. “Over by the university. A law student, crippled. Name Cheryl—”
“Spell it.”
“Wheatcroft, C-h-e-r-y-l W-h-e-a-t-c-r-o-f-t. There have been a bunch of newspaper stories about her, I think, in the Strib.”
“I can look. We’ve got an on-line library.”
“Look in the Pioneer Press too. She was a senior, right at the top of her class. Her folks are here; they live over on the east side of St. Paul. Nobody else knows about it yet, but everybody’s going to find out pretty soon. There are about a million cops in the street, going in and out. And the medical examiner. We’re attracting neighbors and students. But if you get a crew over here fast, you should catch the parents coming out.”
“Five minutes,” she said, and hung up.
“Cheryl Wheatcroft,” Daniel said. He stood in the kitchen, hatless, coatless, angry. “What did she do to deserve this, Davenport? Did she sin? Did she fornicate in the nighttime? Did she miss Mass on Sunday? What did she fuckin’ do, Davenport?”
Lucas looked away from the outburst, tried to deflect it with a question. “What’d they show her folks?”
“Her face. That’s all. Her mother wanted to see the rest of her, but I told her old man to get her out of here. He was almost as bad as the old lady, but he knew what we were talking about, he got her out. That TV camera was right in their faces. Jesus Christ, those people are animals, the fuckin’ TV people are as bad as the fuckin’ maddog.”
The homicide detectives moved around the apartment with their heads down, as though with poor posture they might somehow avoid Daniel’s wrath. The talk was in whispers. It continued in whispers after Daniel left. When he went out the door, the TV cameras across the street caught his face and held it. For the next week, his profile, frozen in anguish like a block of Lake Superior ice, was used to promo the nightly news on Channel Eight.
Lucas stayed at the scene while the technicians processed it. “Is there anything out of the pattern?” he asked the medical examiner.
The chief examiner was on the scene in person. He turned his eyes on Lucas and gave him a tiny nod. “Yeah. He butchered her. The other ones, it was surgical. Go in, kill. This one, he cut apart. She was alive for most of it.”
“Sex?”
“You mean did he rape her? No. Doesn’t look like it. She has numerous stab wounds over the pelvic area, up into the vaginal opening, the rectum, then across the anterior aspect of the pelvis—”
“The what?”
“The front, the front, right up her front. It looks like . . . Mother of God . . .” The medical examiner ran his hands through his graying hair.
“Sam . . .”
“It looks like he was trying to find where the pain started. She has a case full of medical records, and from what I can tell, the spinal event that crippled her was relatively high. Above the hip, below the breasts. She would have lost the superficial . . . Jesus, Lucas, this is freaking me out. Can’t you wait for the reports?”
“No. I want to hear it.”
“Well, when you have a spinal accident, you lose varying amounts of muscular control and the super . . . the feeling in your lower body. The loss ranges from minor disability to total paralysis, where you lose everything. That’s what happened to her. But depending on where the damage happens to the spine, you lose superficial sensory . . . you lose the feeling over different areas. We’re talking about the pain. And it looks like he was systematically working up her body, trying to find where it began.”
“What about all the stab wounds in the vaginal area?”
“I was about to say, that doesn’t fit with the other pattern of wounds. That appears to be sexual. And it’s not uncommon when there’s a sexual motivation behind a murder. There was also substantial flensing of the breasts—”
“What? Flensing?”
“He was skinning her. I think he stopped when he realized she was dying. That’s when he finally put the knife in, so he could do it himself. Kill her.”
“Jesus God.”
The technicians tramped in and out. Lucas poked through the cripple’s possessions, found a small collection of graduation pictures tucked in the top drawer of her chest. She was wearing a black gown and mortarboard, tassel to the left. He slipped the picture in his pocket and left.
Lucas was awake when the newspaper hit his screen door. He lay with his eyes closed for a moment, then gave up and walked out to retrieve it.
A double-deck headline spread across the page. Beneath it a four-column color photograph dominated the page, a shot of the covered body being rolled out to the medical examiner’s wagon on a gurney. The photographer had used a superwide lens that distorted the faces of the men pushing the gurney. HANDICAPPED, the headline said. TORTURE, it said. Lucas closed his eyes and leaned against the wall.
The meeting started angry and stayed that way.
“So there’s nothing substantial?” They were gathered in Daniel’s office—Lucas, Anderson, Lester, a dozen of the lead detectives.
“It’s just like the others. He left us nothing,” said Anderson.
“I’m not going to take this kind of answer anymore,” Daniel suddenly shouted, smashing the top of his desk with his hand, staring at Anderson. “I don’t want to hear this bullshit about—”